How to access files from Android or iOS device?

[Phoenix]

So I've connected an external USB Drive to my ASUS AC88U and put some movies on it. Is there a way or app that would allow me to acess those files from an Android or iOS device for viewing?

 

[Nullity]

SMB or NFS. I know there are Android apps that can act as clients for all of those. You could even setup an HTTP server and simply web-browse to it.

You could install Plex on the router but it has limitations (no transcoding because of the underpowered CPU). You could alternatively install Plex on a PC then mount the SMB/NFS share on that PC, which wouldn't suffer from the same limitations as running Plex on the router itself.

 

[Phoenix]

hmm not sure if I am doing this right, I enabled AiDisk and DDNS to access the files from a browser, I can see the videos on a browser but when I try to play one of them, it is downloading on my device and obviously that would take a long time since they are large FHD movies around 2GB each. I was hoping there was a way to stream them.

A step by step guide would be highly appreciated

 

[Nullity]

You may need a media player like MX Player or VLC.

With both iOS & Android I have been able to stream videos via HTTP. You might need to change the "Open With ..." to these players.

Worst-case scenerio: just copy the video's URL and paste it into your media player.

 

[RMerlin]

ES FileExplorer (Android) can browse SMB shares. You could also use DLNA with a client like PlugPlayer.

 

[Col8eral]

VLC works for me

 

[58chev]

I use X-plore on Android to access files on my network

 

[Col8eral]

There are quite a few ways you can explore. SAMBA, FTP, SFTP and Asus AiCloud

Asus AiCloud funs over https and so is reasonably secure and you can simply use a web browser. You can also you the Asus AiCloud Android app.

Samba you can use ESFile explorer. For ftp and Sftp there are quite a few apps on google play, some paid, some free. AndFtp is good but you really need the paid version, although Sync Ultimate is really powerful for free.

 

[FreshJR]

nPlayer on iOS is hands down the best video player in the world.

It supports everything you can imagine including obscure things like toshibia wifi sd card hotspots, wireless ssd drives, and rtsp streams from IP cams.

ftp, sftp, smb, nfs you name it.
H265 10bit encode with obscure audio codec, you got it.
Webm/vp9 which Apple hates, you got it!
Even .swf files ......

It can act as a client for Amazon Cloud Drive, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive, and Yandex disk.

It has a WebDAV server where when enabled it hosts an http site on your phone where you can upload files to (or share from) any other device that can access the web.

It's a Swiss Army knife. Kills mxplayer on android which doesn't support smb shares iirc.

Also supports chromecast, airplay, dlna, uPnP, and potentially miracast.

It even pulls rating and descriptions from tv, movie, & anime scrappers... mind blowing At this point, I am surprised it's not also a lowkey torrent client.

--

When I went camping **no data**, I found stupid Apple doesn't support bluetooth picture sharing for sharing camping photos.

Of course they invented their own proprietary AirDrop that only works between Apple devices.
Hotspot + nPlayer WebDav server and I am the king of the world.

 

[Sinner]

Ive been using 8 player on ios for years. Its incredible and supports more formats than most althought not sure compared to freshs. Its updated often and has dlna and download to your phone abilities. The ui is also very high quality similar to playstation or xbmc(forgot the new name). Highly recomend. I also have the paid version which may matter.