I only know about movies and not music but should be similar I would think .

I plugged a 500GB SSD with all the movies in a single folder and it was able to see those movies and play them. I'm pretty sure it didn't rip any of the files as they were available immediately. I also believe the internal storage is only 16gb or maybe it was 8gb.

 

JoshFink! I've plugged in a usb hard drive and get nothing. It's not a ssd... it's a WD 1tb MyPassport hard drive. All I get is the error message saying USB device not inserted, or something like that (the light on the hard drive does come on so it is getting power).

I have movies in subfolders on this device, all different formats (mp4, mkv, etc). Is there a max size maybe that the Ody will not recognize??

 

where did you plug in the SSD drive? did the SSD drive separate power?

 

I have an adaptor that takes the SSD to USB and then I plugged it into the USB port inside the center console. No separate power needed

 

I believe it supports USB flash drives up to 256GB. The drive though has to be plugged into the port in the center console. It supports various formats including mp3, aac/mp4, and FLAC. You can have your music organized in sub-folders. I figured out that it supports artwork up to at least 800x800 (I didn't test anything higher because that is the max my other car supports) but it doesn't seem to recognize artwork embedded in the file (at least not for FLAC files). Instead the artwork has to be called folder.jpg in the folder of the music.

The bad part about only being able to plug into the center console port is that there is only one port. If you want to use something else like Android Auto/Apple CarPlay in conjunction with your USB Flash Drive, you can't. I even tried connecting a USB Hub into the port and it actually gave me an error message on the screen that USB Hubs are not supported. I wish it was like my VW Passat that has memory card slots in addition to the USB port.

Regarding ripping, you can "rip" to the internal drive, but you have to specify it to specifically do so. It's not actually ripping but copying the files to the internal drive. If you do that then you can pull the USB flash drive and play music from the internal drive. However the drive is extremely small (I estimate around 8GB) and I have had some problems with it.

For example my music library is in FLAC format. FLAC files are a lossless format vs. a lossy format. Basically what that means that is that with lossless formats the file is compressed but no information is lost. The music files retains the same quality as the the original CD. With lossy, for the sake of compressing better, some information is lost and technically the music file is of inferior quality than the original. However it compresses a lot better. To give you an idea an MP3 file of around 5-6MB will probably be around 30MB in FLAC, where the original file will probably be around 60-70MB.

Since storage is is so cheap now days (I can get a 256GB flash drive for $50-$60 now days), the larger size of the FLAC files is not a big deal because I can still get a large music collection onto a 256GB flash drive in FLAC format.

Now the reason I get into all of that detail is because of two limitations of the internal storage on the Honda Odyssey. With the 8GB storage on the Odyssey, it is very limiting if you are using FLAC format. You could probably only get somewhere between 10-20 albums on there. The other problem I ran into was that the Odyssey does not seem to recognize files of a certain larger size when copied to the internal drive. I copied a small portion of my FLAC collection to the internal drive and the result was that it only recognized a small subset of the music I copied. Taking a look at what it did recognize it was all shorter length songs or intros (maybe under a minute?) It wasn't a format issue with the FLAC files because it did play/recognize the shorter length songs, and the same songs it wasn't recognizing on the internal drive played just fine off of the USB flash drive. Very strange problem but I really decided not to pursue due to the small drive size in the Odyssey. Because of this I really never determined what the cut off size/time was on the files before they started not to show or play. Also I am pretty sure that checking the file manager on the head unit, I did verify that the files were copied over. They just weren't recognized or played.

 

Regarding ripping, you can "rip" to the internal drive, but you have to specify it to specifically do so. It's not actually ripping but copying the files to the internal drive. If you do that then you can pull the USB flash drive and play music from the internal drive. However the drive is extremely small (I estimate around 8GB) and I have had some problems with it.

Anyone know if you have a movie on an external drive, can you transfer that to the internal 8GB drive?

 

Has anyone tried using a USB hub to get more than one USB source on the media USB port? We use a ipod classic from 2006 for music and would like to use iphone for apple car.

 

Has anyone tried using a USB hub to get more than one USB source on the media USB port? We use a ipod classic from 2006 for music and would like to use iphone for apple car.

Um, read the post immediately before yours?

The bad part about only being able to plug into the center console port is that there is only one port. If you want to use something else like Android Auto/Apple CarPlay in conjunction with your USB Flash Drive, you can't. I even tried connecting a USB Hub into the port and it actually gave me an error message on the screen that USB Hubs are not supported.

 

I've tried two USB bus powered (no external power supply) USB 2.0 and 3.0 hubs as well and it did not recognize phones or flash drives plugged into either. This is actually pretty frustrating, even my 2015 civic had two USB data ports.

 

Anyone know what format a USB drive needs. the 64GB drive I used did not work, showed an error in the Honda and it's in NTFS format...maybe needs to be in FAT32?

 

I used ExFat as it was the only format easily (read free) that would work in both the mac and pc. Worked fine.

 

Looking through the Owner's manual I found a few things,

On USB hubs and devices: Page 261

On USB file formats: Page 279, 338 and 375

Audio formats: MP3/WMA/AAC Pages 279, 338, 341 (does not mention FLAC)

File manager: Page 306 (only mentions audio and image files)

File systems supported: Page: ??? ( I am using FAT on a 16 GB thumb drive)

-----

I have noticed that there are issues with the system reading some file names, my car is in the shop so I can't give you exact info today, files that appear in some menu choices don't appear in others. I'm guessing a character in the name is proving unacceptable to the Honda software. It should prove easy to sort out when I finally get my car back.

Something I haven't figured out is playlists, is there something that I could use to create playlists and put them on my thumb drive? Do they go in any specific location or just the home directory?

I'll be playing with this more but any additional information you can share would be great.

 

The exact drive that is giving me problems in the Ody is a 64 GB PNY formatted NTFS. has multiple folders within folders structure all .mp3 files... the ody does not like
However in my 16 BMW X5 it works flawlessly, all folders are visible and easily navigates to any track.

 

The Microsoft NTFS requires that one of the Linux-NTFS drivers be available to read it, not everyone includes one of them in their Linux distribution, particularly in embedded systems like we have.

The drive I'm using is PNY's 16 GB so it isn't likely you are having a hardware issue, just no NTFS driver.

Switch to FAT and you should be fine for music, for video you might run into the file-size limit. If that is the case try one of the more common Linux file systems like ext3 or ext4 or xfs. I was going to try xfs tonight but the dealer is keeping my car, waiting for a part, for several more days.

 

Can music and movies share a SanDisk 256GB cruiser drive? Like to add music files and use the RES for ripped movie files?

 

Yes. I have done that.

Did anybody tried playing Videos through USB. I tried but no luck. Can somebody help me.

Yes and it works. You just have to make sure it is in the right format. There are several other threads that discuss this so just do a search.

 

Did anybody tried playing Videos through USB. I tried but no luck. Can somebody help me.

 

Thank you sir... I will def try ExFat and give it another go.

I just recently tried a USB/adapter stick with a Samsung 64gb micrSD card and the movie I uploaded played just fine. It was a little buggy, however. The movie played for a while but when I tried going back to the root menu and selecting another video the Ody "lost" the usb stick and could not recognize it any longer. However, I believe its my dirt cheap 5yr old usb stick causing the issue.

 

So you can actually upload movie files to the hard drive in the vehicle and play from that then?

 

The internal drive is small so movies might be one or two of them depending on their file sizes.

The upload and remove process is a bit frustrating too so I don't plan to do that myself.

 

Stan-qaz can you elaborate on that upload and remove process? Is this both for music files and/or vid files? or just music?

 

I'm not sure just what you can upload and my Ody is still (been a week now) in the shop waiting for a sliding door part so I can't fool with it.

Page 306 of the owner's manual says image and audio files. Pages 306 to 311 are about the file manager and 341 is playing Honda music from the internal drive.

I did upload some image files for the clock and that proved a bit aggravating but the grand kids were happy to see their faces peering back at them so I'll call it worth the effort.

I went looking for the drive size and couldn't find it listed anywhere but I think someone here mentioned it being around 8 GB, not sure how much of that is free or how to tell about the space.

I may get the Ody back this week and I'll fool with it some to see just what is possible.

 

I uploaded about 80 songs and @ 5 MB each, that's 400 MB. Pretty sure it used < 5% of the total space so if we multiply by 20, that's gives you about 8 Gig, so that figure sounds right.

As far as adding/removing files in File Manager, it appears you can load entire folders or one file at a time. No Cntl-click or Shift-click to highlight groups of files to copy over like in Windows Explorer.

 

I think the drive is actually more in the area of 16GB, but about half that space is taken up by Honda system stuff. I imagine some of that is probably things like the RES apps and such.

 

Got my Ody back from the shop today...

I tried a variety of things, found that FAT-32 works as a file system and MP3 and FLAC for music file formats worked on my thumb drive.

I got errors from the other file systems I tried, xfs, ext2 and ext4, to store music on.

With just FAT available I didn't bother trying a movie iso.

I also got errors on devices other than thumb drives, your luck might vary depending on your hardware but nothing I have here was supported.

 

what about WMA files?

 

I don't have access to Windows or Mac music files to test them but I think both are mentioned in the owner's manual with some restrictions.

 

Try to format the drive to exfat. That should get you going.
I cannot post links yet due to low post count. search google for "format thumb drive windows" how to geek has a good walk through.

 

Standard USB formatted in FAT32.

 

@aliayubabbasi, the US spec Odyssey is very different than your international Odyssey in NZ unless you actually have an imported USA odyssey.