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Watch videos on a Nexus Tablet from an external hard drive

I am a big fan of the Google Nexus 10 tablet. I’ll show you what I did to set up a Nexus tablet to watch movies using an external hard drive.

See how I used an external hard drive to watch a movie on Nexus.
See how I used an external hard drive to watch a movie on Nexus.
See how I used an external hard drive to watch a movie on Nexus.

See how I used an external hard drive to watch a movie on Nexus.

I am a big fan of my Google Nexus 10 (Wi-Fi only, 16 GB) tablet which I bought a few months ago. It has basically replaced my laptop as a mobile computing device. I still use my laptop for most of my work, but for entertainment, or reading it’s definitely my Nexus that I use the most.

One thing I really wanted to do was watch videos while lying in bed or relaxing in my chair. The problem is they are all stored on my external hard drive and the space on my tablet will only hold a few due to the natural size limitations of android tablets so far.

In order to do this I needed a file explorer app and a bit of trial and error.

The app I choose was File Manager, a free app that works just like you think it does as you can see below:

File Manager screenshot

File Manager screenshot

Once this is installed, you need to connect the app to your external drive. In my case my drive is a network attached storage, but this will work with a usb attached drive too.

To do this, click on the Network icon and then the Create and LAN Connection icons, you will come to a screen as shown below:

Lan Connection

Lan Connection

You will need to know the ip address of the external drive, or even easier the smb or network name of the shared folder you want to access.

In my case it was simply “stormdata” (or “192.168.0.5storm” if you are using an ip address), without the quotes. This is entered on the first line and you can fill out the rest if you need or want to. You will want to click the Test Connection button to make sure you have it correctly.

When that’s done, you will see an icon created. If you press and hold the icon, you can create a bookmark. You can also create a widget on the screen linking directly to your connection.

Now all you need to do is fill up the folder with movies or books and enjoy!

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AIAD

This has turned out to be one of my favorite features of owning a tablet, to be able to put all my videos, pictures, documents on an external drive and access it from my tablet.

 

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