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I just installed Opera Unite's video streaming service. I can access my video files through my phones web browser (Galaxy S), but it starts to download instead of playing.

Is there a player I can use to watch streamed videos from my PC?

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  • This says press Play to stream, or click on the file name to download. So, are you pressing Play?
    – Matthew Read
    Commented Jul 29, 2011 at 15:15

2 Answers 2

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Non-root Option

Subsonic

Subsonic is a free, open source, web-based media server in Java. It is easy to install and runs on various platforms. There is also a Subsonic Android App, which allows you to stream audio and video from the server. Video streaming is done with Flash. You should disable transcoding for MP4 files, since Android's Flash Player can play MP4 native.

VLC Remote

Use VLC Remote. Instructions are on he homepage. While this is mainly a remote control app for VLC it's also able to start a stream which you can receive either also with VLC Remote or with any other streaming capable player. I suggest RockPlayer. To start the streaming, open VLC Remote, connect to the VLC instance on you streaming server, browser the files and press long on the file that you want to stream. A context menu should appear, from where you can choose stream.

Root Option

One option, that needs root, is to use cifs manager to mount the windows share with you video data, which enables other players to play the video as it was stored locally on your device.

Paid Option

This would be Plex.

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You could use the file sharing features of your OS to share the folders and then browse them with ES File Explorer. Just tap the Local text in the top left corner and select LAN, press menu and add your shares. In addition you need a player that supports the formats your videos are in, I use DicePlayer. It's not free, but there's a 3 day trial version on the market.

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  • Do the videos get really streamed or are they just downloaded before playing?
    – Flow
    Commented Sep 28, 2011 at 9:58
  • They are streamed since they are handled as normal network shares.
    – aleksikallio
    Commented Sep 28, 2011 at 10:40
  • I tested "ES File Explorer" and I does show an "open with" dialog when accessing for example an .avi file. Astro File Manager doesn't do this. But there is a huge delay before the avi files gets played by the choose player, therefore I doubt that this is real streaming. It seems more that "ES File Explorer" does copy the multimedia file to the device before starting the player. Real streaming over SMB/CIFS can only be achieved with root and cifsmanager.
    – Flow
    Commented Sep 28, 2011 at 14:03
  • Weird, on my tab playback starts in a few seconds, regardless of the size of the file (tested 350mb-7gb).
    – aleksikallio
    Commented Sep 28, 2011 at 19:38

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