I saw a comment in a post about a user that played their USB hard drive directly off the tv. I am liking my Android box but not the way it plays files off my USB drive. Based on your experience, what tv's will play a USB hard drive directly? Preferably at 4Tb... Thanks
Most TVs will play off a hard drive, but the hard drive needs its own power supply. A USB flash drive is low powered, so most TVs can read them, but a portable hdd that gets its power off USB wont work unless its connected to a powered USB Hub or has its own power supply.
I would install the 4TB onto a Windows computer, share it out and use Kodi to browse to it.
Most Smart TV's can access a USB stick pretty easily to show photos and videos. It's not pretty though, since you're browsing a file directory. I recommend people use Plex as a front-end for browsing a media library. Use either an old laptop, NAS, or Shield TV as your Plex server. Or see if your Smart TV has Kodi build.