Want to play music and movies from computer to your mobile phone? Instead of hogging storage on the phone or tablet with music and movies, you can stream off your favorite videos and music from your PC to your Android phone. You just need to tweak a few settings on the Windows PC. Then use a compatible media player with network stream support, you will then be all set to stream music and videos to your Android phone over WiFi connection.
1. Create Network Share on PC
Open Windows File Explorer on your computer, optionally create a new folder, then copy over all the music files and movies you want to stream from their original location to this new folder. Of course, you can also directly share the original music or video folder.
Right-click the folder, and select the Properties option from the context menu. Click on the Sharing tab. Click the Share button.
Then choose people you want to share the files and folder with and grant it the permissions. Since you are streaming media files from your PC to your own mobile phone, you can simply choose the current user to share with and skip the permission settings for this purpose. Do bother to create new users or configure permissions for them.
Click Share button, you will be prompted ‘Your folder is shared‘. Click Done button to close the network sharing and access window.
2. Access Windows Network Share from Android
On your mobile phone, many media players, file managers can access your network share on PC, such as VLC media player, PlayerXtreme, MXPlayer, etc. These free media players can all access Windows Network Share to play music and movies saved on your computer.
Media streaming from PC to phone alternative
You can also choose to setup media server on the desktop to share and stream your media library on the computer. Windows 10 and earlier Windows OS support the DLNA-compliant feature which can turn your PC into a media server to be accessed from other devices on your local network and stream off your media files from computer to other devices over Wi-Fi connection. You can refer to this tutorial to stream music and video from PC to Android for more details.