How To Stream Movies From External Hard Drive To Your Android Tablet
Do you have a large collection of movies and pictures stored in your external hard drive and you just can’t decide which stuff you want to move to your Android tablet’s 32GB SD card especially when you are traveling? You can actually stream data directly from your portable hard drive to your tablet essentially increasing the storage capacity of your tablet beyond SD card.
Here is how you can do it!
Step 1
You need to prepare your external HDD by formatting it to FAT32. If you have stuff in your hard drive, which is in NTFS state, you should move it temporarily to some other media while you prepare your hard drive.
This is perhaps the only downside to this procedure. But depending on your usage you can make this step worth your effort. This is just a one time only step so don’t be afraid to carry out the arduous task of moving your items from and to your HDD.
Step 2
Connect your portable HDD to your tablet.
Step 3
Make sure your USB switch state is set to ‘Host’. Get this free USB Mode Switcher app if you don’t know how to do it.
Step 4
Switch to your file manager app and wait for it to detect your hard drive. It might take sometime for the app to detect your external drive during which time you should keep refreshing, but once it has detected, the streaming is flawless.
If you have followed the above steps properly you should now be able to watch your HD movies on the go!
The same procedure can also be applied to nearly any USB device like pocket drives etc. This can really come handy as you can transfer your documents from your pen drive to your tablet and edit them on the move !
What wire do you use to connect a portable hard drive to an android tablet I would think you would need a wire with two microusb’s on both ends
Precisely !
What are the effects of formatting an external harddrive to FAT32?
I have a 500GB Passport that is full of movies I want to watch on a Acus Transformer Tablet. Is this process capatable with this Tablet?
If so, is there a site that will explain to me how to format my harddrive to FAT32?
You need to root it. if you have then you are good to go.
I’ve been thinking about doing this with my video library and just running a cable from my tablet to my tv, what tablet would you suggest I look at for this, someone I know suggested I look at a Thrive. Also, can you connect more than 1 portable drive to the same tablet at the same time?
About connecting more than 1 portable drive I can not say. ou can try it. It may work. If you try do post the result here.