What device are you using. I figured out my problem by spending few hours trying every possible situation and I’m pretty confident that I know what the problem is. So I’ve tried it on two second gen firestick a with the tivimate and and two separate usb flash drives switching between both and same results all around. Tivimate will NOT play recordings and will not even play them using play with external player option, HOWEVER it is still recording to the usb flash drive through tivimate recording so I can play them with vlc app or even xplore file manager video player. I tried those same two stick since I knew they were both defiantly writable on a 4K firestick and a 4KMAX firestick switched both sticks around and again all results we the same which is that everything was working as intended to be by tivimate recording played through tivimate did not need to download vlc to watch and also the way that firestick 4K and 4K max handle the operating of usb or external storage is completely different then a 2nd gen firestick. Hope this helps and hope that maybe just maybe Alex could tweak something on tivimate to fix recording player tivimate for fire OS 5.2.8.7.