Whats the best way to play digital video files on my tv?

tried plugging it into your TV? I know in my case I have a panasonic plasma and panasonic bluray (both same year model) and although the blu ray player box sprouted about how many files it could play, I found my TV does more! The blu ray just seems too fussy. Sometimes yes for the vid, but no for the audio side of it.

But there is differences for files within a container like Mp4 etc. Maybe the files which have been encoded slightly different to the ones that your player does handle might be the key. I sometimes have this problem on both my TV and blu ray player. Even though it's MP4, it still doesn't work. If it's worth redoing I usually run it through handbrake and that seems to fix it.

As for the skipping, Does your TV or player have an SD socket? I have done this many times and find it works well, (with a good card) either that or I usually stream 99% from my media player straight to the TV via network cable.

The TV's HDMI connected to either your camera or the files on a PC is the simplest & best method.

is it just me or has the original post vanished? I didn't start the thread, someone was asking about having problems playing certain videos on his LG bluray player, but that post is now gone and it seems I am now the starter of the thread

Your post, shown as the #1 was the only one there this evening when I responded.

That's weird!
The original post was all about how his LG blu ray player, whilst the manual said it could play all sorts of files, actually had issues when playing a lot of them. Then he mentioned about the skipping of files that did play when he plugged in his external HDD into the USB port of the player.

And I know I didn't click "start new thread" instead of reply as I used the quick reply box to answer him. I do remember he was a low count user, 3 or 4 posts from memory, wonder if he was banished for something and there was some "space time continuum" thing and maybe the thread was deleted when I was posting ? Who knows!

So whilst my now random looking first post could read like I was asking a question, I was actually trying to answer someone elses question!