Imagine you have lots of songs and movies saved on your Mac that you would like to play using your Android phone. How to achieve that? Copying them over via USB? Transfer them through a cloud storage? In fact, we can simply stream videos, audios from Mac to our mobile phones and tablets on the same network. No need to transfer these heavy media files from one device to another. Mac allows users to enable its built-in file sharing feature so as to access Mac’s hard drive from iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows PC or another Mac. In this article, we will show you how to enable file sharing on Mac, then use a free third-party app on Android to access your Mac and play music, movies saved on Mac using your mobile phone.
Enable file sharing on Mac
On your Mac, click the Apple icon at the top menu bar, choose System Preferences from the drop-down menu. Then go to Sharing and turn on File Sharing. After that you will get the local IP address of your Mac. See below screenshot.
As you may have already noticed from above screenshot, the Shared Folders and Users sections are at the lower section. You can add a shared folder and specify a user to access it. You don’t have to do this if you are the only one to access Mac from other devices of your own. You can simply use the admin account to access the entire hard drive without creating extra user or adding a shared folder.
Stream music & movies from Mac to Android
Download PlayerXtreme free media player on to your Android phone or tablet. Run this app on your Android device. Tap on Network at the bottom right corner, then choose From PC/NAC, the Add Share dialog pops up.
Enter Share Name, such as My Mac, My computer. Choose SMB as the protocol. Enter the IP address of your MAC and its username and password. Tap on Save button to save Mac share to your Android phone.
Now you will see the Mac share on the Network screen of PlayerXtreme player app on your mobile phone. Touch to open and access all your Mac’s files on your Android phone. You can tap to play songs, movies, videos saved on Mac from your smart phone, just like you play media files saved on the local storage of your mobile phone.
