How to Play Local Movies from USB on Amazon Fire TV?

Amazon Fire TV is one of the best media devices that can bring to you various streaming services over the Internet. But what if you want to play some local movies? Does Fire TV have USB playback capabilities? Just follow this article to know more details on how to play movies from USB on your Fire TV.

Not all Fire TVs can access files on USB drives. According to the official Fire TV website, the 1st gen Fire TV supports microSD cards and USB drives as external storage, and the 2nd gen Fire TV can connect to USB storage. However, the 3rd gen Fire TV and all Fire TV Stick devices do not support USB.

But in practice, you may find that external storage can be connected to your Fire TV via an OTG cable, such as the Fire TV Stick 4K. But something to consider is that the Fire TV only recognizes USBs formatted with the FAT32 file system, which has a file size limit of 4GB per file. If your files are larger than 4GB, you need to bypass the 4GB limitation on FAT32.

Here’s a table of the Fire TV supported USB:

Once you figure out whether your Fire TV supports USB and what storage device you should use, the rest is plain sailing. But keep in mind that Fire TV does not have a built-in media player app and you will need to download a third-party app like VLC to watch local movies on Fire TV. Read the next section for details.

Insert the USB into the Fire TV or plug the USB into the OTG cable and connect it to the Fire TV. A message will pop up on the screen informing you that the storage device has been detected.

NOTE: You may encounter a USB storage problem if your USB is not FAT32 formatted. You can have the Fire TV reformat the USB directly to FAT32, but this will erase all data on the USB. So before doing this, please back up all your USB files.

It should be noted that although VLC is a universal media player that can play a variety of videos, it may not be able to play some files due to unsupported video formats. In this case, using a professional video converter program such as WonderFox HD Video Converter Factory Pro to convert videos to MP4 or other VLC supported formats is the best solution.

Here’s a quick guide on how to use this program to complete video conversion:

Tip: Corrupt or incomplete files can also cause video playback to fail on Fire TV. You need to re-download or re-transfer the file correctly.

Playing video files from USB on your Fire TV or Fire TV Stick is easy. Just download VLC, plug in the USB, and play the movie. But remember, for Fire TV to recognize your USB, you need to make sure it's formatted as FAT32, as it's the only USB format supported by Fire TV. Additionally, you will need to reduce the file size below 4GB to make your movie files compatible with FAT32 USB. However, you may still encounter unsupported video format issues, which you can easily resolve by using a reliable video converter.

That’s all I want to share in this post. I hope it was useful to you. Thanks for reading. Have a nice day!