Need To Connect Tablet To Laptop, Question

ryevick · 15 Jul 2022

First, I have a Windows 10 Professional laptop, an Amazon Fire 10 tablet and an Android phone that can create a mobile hotspot.

I am going on the road and I have a 4Tb External HDD that I keep enormous amounts of movies, video tutorials and more stored on. In my scenario the laptop would be more of a hassle to view this content on so I'd like to use my tablet to view videos.

Directly connecting the HDD to the tablet is not very doable because I have only the one port that will need to be charging the tablet and I have issues when trying to connect straight to the tablet.

How can I watch videos from my laptop on my tablet without using cellular data?

NavyLCDR · 16 Jul 2022

I use a USB powered travel router to set up my personal LAN:
https://www.amazon.com/GL-iNet-GL-AR.../dp/B0777L5YN6

There are many options for media sharing with this setup. You can plug the hard drive into the router and use DLNA, with no need for the laptop at all. Or you can set up a PLEX media server (or other media server) on the laptop.

jimbo45 · 17 Jul 2022

NavyLCDR said:

I use a USB powered travel router to set up my personal LAN:
Amazon.com

There are many options for media sharing with this setup. You can plug the hard drive into the router and use DLNA, with no need for the laptop at all. Or you can set up a PLEX media server (or other media server) on the laptop.

Agreed.

By far the best way.

Kodi / VLC will also serve movies for you without any problems.

DNLA though can be a problem if you want to watch your content on say the hotel rooms tv. Most decent hotels have proper TV's with HDMI input - so install the media server on your tablet and stream to your tablet - with the HDMI cable plugged into the TV. (Even easier if the tablet is some type of android device).

It will need a usb connection for your HDD though if your portable router doesn't have a facility for attaching an external HDD. Get one that also can handle the 5ghz band - even better if it can operate in "duplex mode".

Another thing about this is that you can theoretically share the video with people in other rooms and the hotel thinks you are logged on to a single IP address - so avoiding any "Anti-Streaming" restrictions that are on the Hotels network. The hotel wifi though needs to be pretty decent unless you get a nice ethernet connection.

cheers
jimbo