Getting Video Into Your Android

So by now you're a DVD ripping wizard. You've got some movies on your computer in the MP4 format and you're ready to get those into your Android device. The last (and arguably easiest) step is transferring the video files. There are several ways to do this so we'll start with the basics.

First off, we're going to do this by simply manually dragging the video file into our phones memory card or built in memory (depending on your phone). First off, we'll plug our phone into the computer using a USB cable (usually a microUSB cable for Android phones). Depending on how your phone is setup, it may automatically show up as a new external drive on your computer. We'll assume it didn't. Pull the down your drop down status bar and you should see an option saying "Select to Copy Files to This Device" (or something like that). On the next screen press the "Connect USB Storage" button and give the device a moment to mount the memory card.

Now, on your computer your memory card will show up as an external storage drive. On the PC use Windows Explorer to find your memory card, and on the Mac use Finder. On the memory card I like to have a folder called "Videos" that I use to hold all my movies. Create this folder on your memory card and then just click and drag the video file from wherever it is on your computer into this folder. Depending on the size of the file, it could take a few minutes to complete the transfer.



Now you can open your gallery and go to the video folder and your movie should be there, ready to be played. You can also download other apps on the market to use as your video players. I like the DoubleTwist player. You can download it from the market for free and it's great because it does a great job of remembering where you stopped watching the movie and continues from there next time you start watching.

If you had any kind of errors in this process, drop a note in the comments and let me know what device you were trying this with. In the next article we're going to look at doing the same thing using Double Twist. Stay tuned...