TOPIC:

Hi All
I am creating advertising videos for use with TV screens. These little films will auto loop on the TV.
The person who did this before used a PC.
The problem I am having (not sure if this an FCP issue or a mac issue) when I put the mp4 file onto a USB stick and connect it to the TV it shows up as 2 files. One is the mp4 the other seems to be a ghost file as I can't see it when I connect usb directly to mac. So the TV will play the mp4 and then stop when it gets to this ghost file, this then prevents the mp4 from looping. The only work around I have found is to load the mp4 on to a pc, delete the USB and then put the mp4 back on the USB from the pc, no ghost file!
Has anyone any experience with this? Is there a setting which stops this ghost file from appearing?
Many thanks for the help.

It might be due to the formatting used on the USB drive. This might be helpful:

How to Correctly Format a USB Drive for Your TV

macOS may store several types of "invisible" files for metadata, tags, and Spotlight searches, for example.

If you are familiar with using Terminal, there are some ways to remove these files. But the easiest solution may be to use something like this:

USBclean 

In case you're interested, here's a more technical discussion of this behavior:

forums.macrumors.com/threads/solved-prev...-usb-drives.2022099/

In addition to what Dave said, in Finder you can do SHIFT+CMD+. to toggle on/off display of the hidden files. Then you can delete the unnecessary ones on the thumb drive. I think that will work.

Picking a bit at nits...


When you remove "invisible" files manually from a USB flash drive, you need to eject the drive very soon afterwards. If not, macOS may sneak some invisible files back onto the drive. That's one reason I would tend to use something like USBclean...

All TVs I've come across have the ability to select REPEAT when choosing a video file off a USB drive amongst many other files, ghost ones or no. (I'll find a BUDA file on my drives after connecting to a TV that wasn't there to begin with.) Select that option and no more chasing your tail no matter what's on the stick.