playing external Hard Drive on TV

Today I attempted to play movies from my external hard drive onto my TV. I have done this before with a different TV but this time there was a problem. I connected the YPbPr cable and got the TV showing the Media player icons of photo, music, video and file. For some reason the remote control enter button wasn't working but that is a minor issue. When i went into the File menu it shows nothing but a folder called ROOT with nothing in it. I am not able to enter any of the other icons as I am told "no file in this mode".
The hard drive has various .avi files and I know the hard drive supports these. I thought the problem was that I had not transferred the VLC media player .exe over but I have now done this and it has not made any difference.
On the hard drive I have a number of folders with .avi files in them and two windows backup files.
I am not sure what the problem is - maybe someone can help?

Many thanks

Matthew

 

I assume your using a media player connected to a TV not just an external hard drive? Posting the model would be helpful,if it is just media files from an external hard drive being played BY the TV then I'm unsure of where the video cable comes in.?

Could you provide more info

 

Sure yes it is a media player - the name is HDD Media Player there is no other name for make. There are three output sockets:
- VGA out
- AV out
- YPbPr

Last time I used the VGA out cable but it has been lost in transit. So I was using the YPbPr . Are you saying that this will not work? The TV has two sets of relevant input sockets
- YPbPr DVI Audio input (two holes)
- YPbPr (three holes)

I was using a cable with three plug ends (blue, green and red) which match the colours of the holes on the TV. Should I be using a different cable?

Many thanks

Matthew