Stream Videos and Music from PC to Android over WiFi

Watching movies from your Bed can be an ultimate comfort, unfortunately being a music lover, most of my phone’s storage is filled with music. Which is why most of the time I don’t have enough storage left on my Android phone to copy even a few movies .

But being geeky has its own benefits. Instead of copying movies to my Android phone’s storage, I just stream them off my PC’s hard disk over my WiFi connection and watch them on my Android phone. Believe me it’s as simple as i say and you only need to set it up once and after that, at anytime you can stream off your favorite videos and music on your android phone from your PC .

If you need a few reasons to motivate yourself, then here are a few reasons why you should stream music and videos to your Android phone over WiFi.

1. You don’t need to move from bed .
2. You don’t have to worry about storage !
3. You don’t need to wait for videos to download
4. You can even download other files from your PC to your Android phone .

Depending upon your requirement you can even add a few more reasons. Continue reading to find how you can stream music and videos from your PC to your Android phone over a WiFi connection .

What you will need ?

In this guide we are going make use of two free android apps and tweak a few settings on your windows PC. After that you will be all set to stream music and videos to your android phone over your WiFi connection . Before we proceed further , Download and Install the following apps on your Android Phone.

1. MX Player – Simply because it plays anything and everything.
2. ES File Explorer

Although you don’t need MX player specifically, i recommend MX player mainly because of its capability to play many video formats without the need of any extra codecs. Once you have installed the above apps on your android phone, follow the instructions below to stream videos and music from your android phone over your WiFi connection .

Note: I have divided this process into two parts, so that it will be easier for you to follow the instructions . The first part is all about setting up your PC to share folders and drives through WiFi and the second part is about streaming music and videos files from your PC using the ES file explorer.

Part 1: Instructions to Share folders and drives on your Windows PC

Note: In order to make streaming of videos and music much easier, I will advise you to move all your music and videos into a two different folders according to the media type.

• Step 1: On your windows PC,  right click on the Folder / drive which you want to share and click on properties .
• Step 2:  From the properties windows, select the sharing tab and click on the share button.

• Step 3:  In the file sharing window that opens up, select everyone from the drop down as shown below and then click on the add button.

• Step 4: Click on the share button to share the folder with everyone. Now the folder will be shared with everyone on connected to your wifi network. But they can’t access it until they know your PC login username and password. Similarly you can follow the same process to share different drives.

Once you have shared the drives and folders, follow the instructions below to stream music and videos from your PC.

Part 2: Instructions to Stream videos from your PC to a Android phone

• Step 5: On your android phone, connect to your PC’s WiFi network.
• Step 6: Open ES file explorer and tap on the topmost icon to the left, which will slide out the fast access menu.

• Step 7: From the fast access menu, Tap on network and ten tap on LAN.

• Step 8: Next tap on the scan button and wait for a few seconds for the app to detect your PC.

• Step  9: Once the app detects and shows your PC’s icon, tap and hold your PC’s icon and select edit server from the options that appear.

• Step 10: Type in your PC’s username and password in the space provides and uncheck anonymous. Click OK to save the username and password.

• Step 11: Now tap on your PC icon and voila you will be able to access the shared folders and drives on your PC.

• Step 12: Tap on your shared folder to open it and tap again on any video or music file to stream it to your phone. when you play a video or music file, you will be prompted to select a video player, select any video player of your choice ( although i would recommend MX player ) and you will be able to stream the video on your android phone.

Thats it, once you have set the shared folders on your windows PC,  you can anytime browse through your shared folders and drives and stream all the music and videos files to your Android phone. Even you can access the same files on multiple devices simultaneously and even copy them to your android phones and other devices as well.