Today’s smartphones, particularly those based on the Android platform, are media powerhouses, so it’s very likely that you have tons of photos and video clips you’d like to share with friends and family. But it can get pretty painful showing them off on your handset’s tiny screen. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could watch it on your laptop, desktop monitor or your large screen TV without having to transfer the files onto your PC? Getting a USB cable and hooking up your phone to your PC is tedious and time consuming. And what if you happen to be at a friend’s place and don’t have your USB cable with you? Moreover, you wouldn’t want to transfer your personal media onto someone else’s PC. In this workshop, we will show you how you can stream video, photos or music from your mobile phone directly on to a desktop PC or laptop. All you need is a simple free Android app called VLC Direct, a media playback application called VLC Media Player on your PC, and the two connected to the same network. Download VLC Direct for free from the Android Market. Download and install VLC on your PC from ‘www.videolan.org’. Connect the PC and the Android phone to a wireless router and you are ready to stream. Step 1: Start VLC Direct on your Android handheld. A small wizard will guide you through the process of configuring the video streaming necessities. Be careful because if youaccidentally quit the application or press the back button on your phone, VLC Direct will exit and not show you the wizard again. In this case, you can press the Menu button, go to ‘Settings’, and select the ‘Automatic Connection Wizard’ to re-initiate the wizard.
Step 2: Start your PC, connect it to a large screen LCD TV if you want to enjoy videos on a big screen. Start VLC Media Player on your PC. Click on ‘View | Add Interface | Web interface’ and leave VLC Media player as it is. Step 3: On the mobile phone screen, select the ‘Start’ button and the VLC Direct app will start scanning for the machine with VLC Media Player on your local network. Once that is done, you receive a toast message stating that it has found the player and the configurations have been set. You are now ready to stream your
media files onto your PC instantly. Using the Android handset, you can sit back and
scroll through your list of videos, photos, or music files and watch play them back on the big screen. You can control the playback (stop, play, pause, forward or rewind) and volume controls too. What’s more, you can also pull up the list of media files stored on the PC (running the VLC Media Player) and play those. The VLC Direct interface includes playback control buttons, icons for videos and music on your phone, monitor icon for listing files available on the remote PC and a VLC icon for a playlist. Towards the top-left of the screen, you will find an Android logo icon
(target), which is a toggle button that can be used to direct the video stream to your PC from your handheld or from the PC to the handheld. The screenshots here will explain these
buttons in detail. Streaming media from the PC to the Android phone is pretty
simple using the target button. Using this mode is beneficial as you don’t need to transcode or
convert your videos into a compatible format for your Android device.You can also save on
storage space on your phone by treating the PC as a media server. Streaming
from your PC to the Android device can also be convenient when someone elseis using the laptop and you’d like to access media content on it.
Note: In order to stream media files from a PC to your Android phone, youwill need to purchase the VLC Direct Pro version, which is available on the Android Market for Rs 164. The Free
version can stream seamlessly to a PC without any limit, but streaming from a PC to your phone is only allowed for a few minutes.
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