USB sockets on routers to serve media

 I thought it would be terribly handy to have a USB flash drive with some files, eg my favourite movies, attached to my router. I couldn't understand why I couldn't see my  files, until I found a post suggesting that most routers only recognised FAT32. Well, no one has used that for  years I thought, what am I to do?

So then I thught, ok, I can format a USB stick FAT32. Only... it's a 128GB USB stick and Windows 10 doesn't allow you to format FAT32 that large. Loads of comments on blogs where the command line was advocated saying that the windows command line also didn't work.

So I tried in linux on the Raspberry Pi B+. It really was a simple as

lsblk

to identify which device, and then

sudo mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sdb1

to format the USB stick. It took about 10 seconds. I then moved the USB stick to my computer with the mnovie files, copied them across, and put the USB stick in my router. 

The router's admin page recognised the USB stick, and VLC showed the media server and allowed me to watch the video. Amazing. Well, not really. But compared to Windows, yes amazing.

(from https://linuxvox.com/blog/linux-format-fat32)


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