The VideoLAN Forums

Hi All,
Not being a tech head, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that there is no way I will be able to use the VLC app on my iPad to be able to read video files on my San Disk iXpand Flash Drive, or any other iMemory drive, and be able to cast them to Chromecast. Is it Apple's policy to prevent this from occurring? Is there another possible work around?

I want to avoid loading large video files on my iPad because of memory constraints, and the longer time to do a backup on iTunes due to these video files. I'm a bit slow on the researching thing I know, but I believe I can use Dropbox to stream to VLC, but can you cast these files to a Chromecast device? There have been some issues casting when I've loaded movies on the iPad, so I'm wondering if they will persist if I try streaming from Dropbox.

Hope someone can advise on the above as there's not a lot of help from the net.

Cheers Harvey

Chirp....Chirp

Hello,

There is no official support for Flash Drives on VLC-iOS.
As you said, you can use a cloud service(Dropbox, OneDrive, GDrive, ...) in order to stream the media.
Some issues with Chromecast will be fixed on the 3.1.6 release.

So for an iPad, there's really no option but to download video files directly to it, as uploading them to Dropbox or Google drive to stream, take forever to load! Which is a pity as streaming to VLC and casting , work fine for MP4 files, but casting's not so good with others, but a problem that could be fixed in new VLC update.

Just wondered if there's some other work around for this problem.

Cheers Harvey

You should be able to cast items stored in Dropbox just fine (as if the files were local). I didn't try personally, but that would be the expected behavior.

Regrettably, Apple does not allow direct access to external storage devices for apps unless those apps are written by the device manufacturer. There is a companion app for the San Disk iXpand drives, which includes a media player which in fact is nothing else but VLC and it plays all the stored videos just fine (we helped them to achieve that). However, I'm not sure if they updated their app to also include Chromecast support. If not, ask them to!