Tablets and smartphones have now replaced laptops, at least for entertainment. There is no better thing than going to bed with your tablet in hand to watch a streaming TV show or listen to music. With a tablet or smartphone you can watch a streaming movie even sitting in the garden, on the train, at the airport and wherever you go. At home, with wireless networks, you can keep video or music files on your PC and project it on the screen of your tablet or mobile phone.
A wifi router connected to the modem is therefore enough to connect from the tablet or mobile phone on the same network as the computer where there are all the shared resources: movies, music and photos. Since Android is a flexible operating system, the Android Mini PCs or Dongles were also born, which connect in HDMI to the TV and in Wifi to the PC to view videos from the web or any film saved on the computer, all wirelessly.
In this guide we see the 4 ways to stream video from your computer with an Android device (mobile tablet or miniPC) on your local home network . Video streaming will not be limited by Internet bandwidth and the quality will only depend on the speed of the router.
1) The easiest way to stream videos on an Android device is by connecting remotely to shared files on your PC .
If you are using a Windows PC, you can share files and folders.
File sharing can be done in FTP or in SMB (Samba) which can be activated from Windows, Mac ( System Preferences -> File Sharing -> Options ) or Linux.
To configure file sharing and the network connection between your computer and Android terminals (Samsung mobile phones, tablets or Mini PCs) you can follow the guide step by step to access the shared Windows folders from Android in wifi.
The suggested application to browse the files of the computer connected to the network is ES File Manager which always remains a non plus ultra to have at any cost.
With ES File Manager just go to the folder of the PC where there are movies and open them using one of the Android apps to watch videos and movies .
Among these I suggest using MX Video player capable of playing any type of video file.
Another very good app to open streaming video that supports http, https, mms, rtmp, rtsp protocols, is Wuffy Media Player, which also works to open Acestream links on Android.
2) Using VLC Media Player you can watch PC videos on Android
First of all, open VLC for Android and activate the option to play videos in the background.
Then share the PC folders on the network, also possibly using the home group.
On the smartphone or tablet, with VLC, it is possible to connect to the video and music folder on the PC, in the wifi network, to stream multimedia contents.
3) An effective solution is to use a desktop client application that acts as a server and an app on Android that connects to the server and plays videos .
This only requires you to install the program on your computer which must remain active and ready to receive input requests from Android phones or mini-computers or even from iPads and iPhones.
The best of these apps is probably NOTE: By using a program like Tonido, to which I have dedicated an article, you can watch PC videos on Android streaming in a simple and direct way.
Another program is Air Playit available for Windows and Mac.
From your PC or Mac, just choose the folders to share, which should be navigable from the free AirPlayit application for Android. In addition to video streaming, Air Playit can also convert movies on your computer so that it can be downloaded to your Android device so that you can watch it even without a network connection.
AirPlayit is an excellent solution to create a streaming media center on your PC to watch videos from any other terminal on the network.
Another app that works very well is AirStream is perhaps the best app for watching videos and even movies of all formats, including MKV, streamed on mobile.
If you have movies on your computer, if your PC and mobile phone are connected to the same Wifi network, just install the Airstream program on your PC and the app on your Android mobile phone to create the connection and see each video on the screen of your mobile phone or tablet.
4) Connect to a UPnP / DLNA Server
Connecting to a UPnP / DLNA server offers more flexibility for streaming video and music media.
Most media center applications create a UPnP / DLNA server on the computer: the most famous is XBMC (see how to install XBMC on Android) but the easiest to use is Plex.
BubbleUPnP is one of the best Android applications to connect to UPnP.
A completely free app that acts as a DLNA / UPnP browser is Mediahouse .
After making the connection, the procedure of the first method (see above) applies, using an app like MX Media Player to play the videos.
To see videos and movies saved on the PC streamed via the internet even away from home, the best app to share videos is pCloud, a cloud storage with streaming video and music that has a 10GB online space to share files on the internet and being able to use them whenever and wherever you want.
