Movies from external hard drive storage to TV?

Thank you all for your help! My husband is off to see if our current DVD player and/or TV has a USB port. If not--Im thinking the simple solution is to buy an inexpensive DVD/Blueray player. We don't have a disc drive on any of our Macs--they seem be a thing of the past.

Now I just have to figure out which format to use--our movies are all formatted to stream on our Apple TV. But it's easy enough to re-format the ones we want to watch.

Thanks again,
TVQ1