tg582n technicolor. media server issues

[#1]

Hi everyone.
old plusnet customer but new to fibre. also new in the area
for some time now i have been using 2 or 3 android devices to stream movies across to my playstation three.
with my new fibre broadband i have been issued a technicolor tg582n
speed is a little down from quoted but we cant have everything. however when i have come to stream its extremely jumpy and just plain unreliable. these are files i have watched with little or no hassle on my old netgear dg834g (iirc)
so i did some research on the unpnp, media server options on the router and set about.
ive recently purchased a 1tb external HDD to hook up and use.when i plugged it in it says format not recognized - error. Its NTFS
i plug an old fat32 flash drive in and it works.
nowhere in its instructions does it say it can only recognize fat32 so am i doing something wrong?
the hdd wont be going to waste if it cant be used but i still would like to stream - if i go back to my android phones and tablet what settings are best so it works clean?
im ten minutes short of buying an asus rt-n666u which im hedging bets i can just plug my hdd into and be done
any help/clarification is appreciated!

[#2]

Unfortunately the plusnet version of this router does not support USB drives formatted to NTFS, it only supports FAT / FAT32.
Shame really because the O2 version of the same router does support NTFS. 

[#3]

simsmith1 could you not format your external drive by plugging it into a PC? you could create fat 32 partitions on the drive although there is a size limit which might hinder things, although you could just create lots of small partitions? I dont know if the router supports ext type partions that linux uses, as they could be formatted at a large size.