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I'd like to be able to stream video to my android phone (Samsung Galaxy S rooted 2.2) from a PC running Windows XP (I'm at work!).
There's no wireless network here, VLC and similar marketplace apps seem to only offer this service over wifi/3G; can I over USB?
I think the answer here is "in all practicability, no."
One hypothetical alternative would be USB host support, and to mount an external hard drive or thumb drive onto your phone. This would mean doing something like this, How To Mount External Hard Drive to Your XOOM. This seems impractical and potentially dangerous (who knows if that OTG cable might cause a short). The SGS may not even recognize the cable, or the drive, and the apk may not work with your phone.
That's the best answer I have on actually connecting via usb to a storage location.
Actual streaming from a PC via the USB port, though? Even if there were a way, it'd probably require extensive work on both the phone and the computer. Wouldn't a better (and way easier) solution be to buy a wireless USB adapter and set it to ad-hoc mode and SSID non-broadcast? Just a thought.
You could turn on "USB Tethering", then run some media server like VLC carefully configured with RTSP streaming on your local server. Then open up the stock browser on android, type in your local ip (prefixed with rtsp:// protocol instead of http) of the pc followed by the port number as set in VLC or equivalent. The Android media player should launch if all is set and should start to play the video.
The local ip must be the ip of the PC running VLC or equivalent media server. You'll need to find it through right clicking the active LAN connection (of usb tether) > status > "IP address : "..
Do disable firewalls or add exclusions appropriately for this to work, also, set the VLC with proper video transcoding format that your android can play.
Warning: you might want to disable data pack when enabling the usb tether to avoid incurring unwanted costs.
