My plan is to download VLC player, and play them through that. I also don't want to format my drive to fat32 because of large files. I'd be grateful for any advice?
My plan is to download VLC player, and play them through that. I also don't want to format my drive to fat32 because of large files. I'd be grateful for any advice?
Yes. I use Nova video player to stream from my shared SMB drive and from my UPNP drive.
Yes you can use AndroidTV to play local content, be it via VLC, Simple player, or any other player of such kind.
Some older AndroidTV devices may struggle on some video files but overall it will work just fine.
Also you did not specify your AndroidTV device? Some may read NTFS, some exFAT. While in older devices you can use Total Commander with plugins to read external devices.
Last option is to create a network share on Windows (or any other PC machine) and use as a share drive from Android TV.