USB portable hard drive to caravan TV?

In the absence of any relevant information, have you tried contacting the manufacturer?

If there is no power on the USB port of the TV then there will be no harm. The USB drive will not power up and the TV will not be able to read anything.

USB has only 4 "pins" - 2 for power and 2 for data - and there are no variations to standards that I am aware of that would not maintain the relationship of all pins between all devices.

Plug it in and if it lights up then all should be good - but if no power from the TV then no damage will be done and you will need a seperate power supply for the USB drive - but I expect that will be unlikely.

Hi Bungarra,

I have watched several movies on my TV via a USB port and portable hard drive and had no problems using the USB as the only means of power.

My portable HD has no other power source anyway.
The only problem I had related to out of the ordinary formats.

I would assume that most USB ports, certainly on a TV, would conform to an international standard, with regard to current capacity.
After all, I pressume that that is why they are fitted to the TV, to run an external HD or similar.

I know that not all USB plugs are able to carry a reasonable amount of current as some cig socket USB adapters will not charge my phone in the car, while others with a higher capacity will.

Cheers, Bruce.

Hi Bungarra. My van is a 2010 model with a 22" Sphere TV. It will power a usb hard drive from either end of the tele. What took me ages to work out was if you have a program recorded from an external device then it plays through the usb at the dvd player end. If you wish to record and then play the recorded program then it must be done from the Coax/power source end. The remote can also be a bit fiddly when operating the timer/record menu also. Sometimes I have to try 2 or 3 times to get it to activate. Cheers,Bob.

Firstly try a usb thumb drive with the files to verify that they work with the TV.
Once that is ok you need to make sure that you get a USB hard drive that draws less than 500mA which is the standard that a USB port can drive. Some hard drives use more power and need to be externally powered of powered off 2 USB ports.