Your Nexus 7 can connect and play media via a portable DVD player

We did know that the Nexus 7 was capable of a lot of cool things, but being able to connect to a portable DVD player and playing media off it was not one of them. Well, it turns out that it CAN actually do that, by way of the the USB OTG functionality that Nexus devices come with.

A YouTube user named veryannoyingname, managed to hook up his Nexus 7 tablet to an external Samsung DVD burner, and access media files from the burner.  Usually external drives like these do not support playback on a tablet, but in this case, it seems long-pressing the Eject button on the drive, supposedly activates AV mode, and the files in the drive are converted to FAT32 format and can be played on a compatible device via a paid Android app called Nexus Media Importer.

Keep in mind though, that the external drive this user had was a Samsung Smart Media Hub, which is a lot more than just a standard external DVD drive or player. But if you have an external DVD burner, or a portable DVD player lying around, no harm in trying this out, right? USB OTG adapters are available all over the place, including eBay, for a couple of dollars at most. And this certainly seems like a cool way for someone with a huge collection of DVDs to watch them on the go.

veryannoyingname was also kind enough to uplaod a video of his entire experiment, and you can see for yourself how this works on the Nexus 10. Cracking device this, we must say!

4 Comments

  1. This does sound an interesting concept.

    Has anyone tried it with a ‘basic’ Samsung external DVD writer, such as their SE-208AB/TSBS which can be bought(in the U.K.) for about £20 or so?

    Is there any reason why this sort of device would not work, or does it have to be a ‘smart media hub’ type of thing?

    As it does look as if a smart media hub, with the specific built in functionality to remap CDFS to FAT is required, what specific models are we looking for here, please?

    For example, would the Samsung Slim Retail Ext Smart NAS Optical Hub, model SE-208BW/UKBS work?

  2. This does sound an interesting concept.

    Has anyone tried it with a ‘basic’ Samsung external DVD writer, such as their SE-208AB/TSBS which can be bought(in the U.K.) for about £20 or so?

    Is their any reason why this sort of device would not work, or does it have to be a ‘smart media hub’ type of thing?

  3. This does sound an interesting concept.

    Has anyone tried it with a ‘basic’ Samsung external DVD writer, such as their SE-208AB/TSBS which can be bought(in the U.K.) for about £20 or so?

    Is their any reason why this sort of device would not work, or does it have to be a ‘smart media hub’ type of thing?

  4. This does sound an interesting concept.

    Has anyone tried it with a ‘basic’ Samsung external DVD writer, such as their SE-208AB/TSBS which can be bought(in the U.K.) for about £20 or so?

    Is there any reason why this sort of device would not work, or does it have to be a ‘smart media hub’ type of thing?

    As it does look as if a smart media hub, with the specific built in functionality to remap CDFS to FAT is required, what specific models are we looking for here, please?

    For example, would the Samsung Slim Retail Ext Smart NAS Optical Hub, model SE-208BW/UKBS work?

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