Marshmallow finally added official support for connecting OTG flash drives natively without the need for a third-party app.
On the Nexus Player running Marshmallow, connecting a flash drive will mount the device so any app with file system access can read files. This allows apps such as MX Player to treat the flash drive as "local storage" so if you do a scan for local media, the contents of the flash drive will appear.
On other Nexus devices I've tested running Marshmallow (Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Pixel C, etc), connecting a flash drive allows media to be copied to local storage. However, it doesn't appear to "mount" the drive. Scanning for media on MX Player finds nothing. If I use the native Android file explorer to open video files using MX Player, the path appears as a "content://" URI instead of a local file.
Is there any way I can make Marshmallow devices treat external media like the Nexus Player so flash drives are actually "mounted"?
I know this is possible if I root my device using StickMount, but I'm looking for a solution that doesn't require rooting my device.
Just bumping this...I'm interested in the same. Thanks!
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Hi,
If this has been asked before i apologies but i've searched, used google, and never really found the answer i'm looking for.
I have a nexus 7, OTG cable, flash drive and stickmount installed. As an external storage device this works fine for movies, audio etc.
I'm not experienced with android having only previously used it on my touchpad, and wondered if the following was possible.
Is there an app that can essentially clone the externally mounted USB drive so that when installing an app with a large data download i can choose to download the data to the externally mounted usb drive instead of the main device memory. An example, Spiderman has nearly 2GB of data and i would prefer to move it using an app rather than having to continuously move the data file from the root to the external USB using es file explorer.
Many thanks for the help
Doobdonk said:
Hi,
If this has been asked before i apologies but i've searched, used google, and never really found the answer i'm looking for.
I have a nexus 7, OTG cable, flash drive and stickmount installed. As an external storage device this works fine for movies, audio etc.
I'm not experienced with android having only previously used it on my touchpad, and wondered if the following was possible.
Is there an app that can essentially clone the externally mounted USB drive so that when installing an app with a large data download i can choose to download the data to the externally mounted usb drive instead of the main device memory. An example, Spiderman has nearly 2GB of data and i would prefer to move it using an app rather than having to continuously move the data file from the root to the external USB using es file explorer.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hard Link feature of ext4 partition can help you.
I recently purchased a Pivos Xios Android Media Center. I bought it to replace my Popcorn Hour Network Media Tank. I had been using a 1 terabyte drive in the NMT, which the Linux back end of the NMT had formatted to the EXT3 file system. After my NMT died, I moved the hard drive into an external USB enclosure. I was able to get the Xios to read from the drive using the USB OTG (On the Go) Helper; the Xios would not recognize the drive without the app, as apparently the build of ICS it uses cannot natively read from EXT3 devices connected externally (even though it uses an EXT format on its internal drive space). The Xios was able to read from the files deposited by the NMT on the drive fine; I could also see and read the files on my PC using the Samba File Sharing app. So things were looking up, and it looked like I had found a good replacement for my NMT. Then I ran into a problem.
Any file I copy from my PC to the EXT3 USB drive is unreadable. I can copy files to the FAT32 Microsd card without issue, but the files I copy to the HD show as Readable: No and Writable: No on ES File Explorer. Any media player that attempts to play the files fails. I can play media from the SD card fine, and from my PC fine. If I attempt to copy a file from the SD card to the HD using ES, the copy operation fails.
From my limited experience with Unix/Linux, I'd say permission to write a readable file to the HD still belongs to my dead Popcorn NMT. I need a way to have the Xios take ownership either for the files I copy from my PC, or the entire partition. The Xios comes rooted by default. Is there some kind of Android command line app and a script I can use to do this, or some kind of an ownership app I can use to take ownership of the drive?
Thanks!
Ustankragnar said:
I recently purchased a Pivos Xios Android Media Center. I bought it to replace my Popcorn Hour Network Media Tank. I had been using a 1 terabyte drive in the NMT, which the Linux back end of the NMT had formatted to the EXT3 file system. After my NMT died, I moved the hard drive into an external USB enclosure. I was able to get the Xios to read from the drive using the USB OTG (On the Go) Helper; the Xios would not recognize the drive without the app, as apparently the build of ICS it uses cannot natively read from EXT3 devices connected externally (even though it uses an EXT format on its internal drive space). The Xios was able to read from the files deposited by the NMT on the drive fine; I could also see and read the files on my PC using the Samba File Sharing app. So things were looking up, and it looked like I had found a good replacement for my NMT. Then I ran into a problem.
Any file I copy from my PC to the EXT3 USB drive is unreadable. I can copy files to the FAT32 Microsd card without issue, but the files I copy to the HD show as Readable: No and Writable: No on ES File Explorer. Any media player that attempts to play the files fails. I can play media from the SD card fine, and from my PC fine. If I attempt to copy a file from the SD card to the HD using ES, the copy operation fails.
From my limited experience with Unix/Linux, I'd say permission to write a readable file to the HD still belongs to my dead Popcorn NMT. I need a way to have the Xios take ownership either for the files I copy from my PC, or the entire partition. The Xios comes rooted by default. Is there some kind of Android command line app and a script I can use to do this, or some kind of an ownership app I can use to take ownership of the drive?
Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Update: I'm able to use Root Explorer to change the permissions on files deposited onto to the drive by PC over Samba. I have to change permissions on both the created folder and the file to do this. This is a tedious process using Root Explorer. Would I be able to use Remote ADB to change the permissions on the ext3 drive from my PC in bulk, or does it always have to be done at the file/folder level. I'd preferably just like to transfer ownership of the ext3 partition to the Xios.
Vzw phone so no root access. Note my phone is a Play version.
Solid Explorer, the new one, works and shows path of : /mnt/media_rw/0EB0-0FF1. It also asks for permissions and you can successfully grant them. Yet you cannot see this folder/drive while exploring /mnt. It creates it's own shortcut and browsing is fine that way..
Neutron sees the drive and tries the get permissions but you never get to grant them.
Google Player (stock), Player Dreams, Jetaudio, Hiby and Kamerton do not see the drive at all.
Has anyone had success with any player accessing OTG drives?
I'm having the same problem, I couldn't access my NTFS formatted stick with neither using stickmount nor the Paragon app.
After reformatting my stick to FAT32 it's mounted by the system but only accessible and usable by the integrated android file manager.
I now tried total commander and the Paragon plugin and this way you can access files and play them in your standard player and it's even able to load subtitles to a movie but this way it's not even mounted as separate device anymore and therefore not visible to anything.
I'm using the TurboZ kernel and already wrote the creator about the NTFS problem.
regenwurm16 said:
I'm having the same problem, I couldn't access my NTFS formatted stick with neither using stickmount nor the Paragon app.
After reformatting my stick to FAT32 it's mounted by the system but only accessible and usable by the integrated android file manager.
I now tried total commander and the Paragon plugin and this way you can access files and play them in your standard player and it's even able to load subtitles to a movie but this way it's not even mounted as separate device anymore and therefore not visible to anything.
I'm using the TurboZ kernel and already wrote the creator about the NTFS problem.
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Click to collapse
I take it you are still on MM.
I found some better filers but still no players.
MM is a tricky one for Dev's to get OTG right. I read many stackoverflow comments, hence the shortage of apps. I think N might be worse.
See here and other recent post of mine.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=3533577
Yes I'm still on MM
It's not the file managers fault but more that there's no reliable/functioning way to actually mount an NTFS or even FAT32 OTG stick in a manner that it's easily visible for apps and such under marshmallow.
I tried a few of your suggested apps but only x-plore and "file manager by scavengers" offered an access to the USB stick prompt but didn't actually display it then (probably because of NTFS) or offer a real mount option so they are not helping with my problem but thanks anyway for the help/suggestion.
Actual mounting isn't supported under marshmallow anymore (as far as I found out) so USB OTG is pretty useless now because I don't want to use a file manager to access the files and hope it's able to combine the video with the subtitle file.
regenwurm16 said:
Yes I'm still on MM
It's not the file managers fault but more that there's no reliable/functioning way to actually mount an NTFS or even FAT32 OTG stick in a manner that it's easily visible for apps and such under marshmallow.
I tried a few of your suggested apps but only x-plore and "file manager by scavengers" offered an access to the USB stick prompt but didn't actually display it then (probably because of NTFS) or offer a real mount option so they are not helping with my problem but thanks anyway for the help/suggestion.
Actual mounting isn't supported under marshmallow anymore (as far as I found out) so USB OTG is pretty useless now because I don't want to use a file manager to access the files and hope it's able to combine the video with the subtitle file.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Right no hard mounts anymore.
But I use xfat and all app suggestions do work. FX is best but it does not let you use all the app on your phone. But these are Dev growing pains.
I actually just managed to mount it like it used to with stickmount but with an app called "USB OTG helper" by "Ray of light"
I tried it before and it gave me the error that it couldn't create the folder where it wanted to mount the stick so it didn't work but now after installing it again it worked flawlessly.
I suspect it's because I used the "external SD card full access" option from the xposed module "installeropt" because now it didn't write any error messages and worked as expected even with an NTFS USB stick.
As we all have observed, usb mass storage is not available anymore on our devices. This isn't a bad thing if you're using a computer but... I have a tablet and the plan is to access the phone using the usb otg. It's partially working since when I connect the phone 2 options show up: gallery and downloads, with downloads i can access all the files from the phone but I can't seem to find any file using anything else. The tablet is rooted, the phone isn't. With root explorer I can't find anywhere the phone and its contents. Why it is important to me? because i want to use the tablet as a media center in a car and if i had the option of usb mass storage as before i could have the music player play straight from the phone as it would be seen as an usb storage.
I posted this here because it has nothing to do with the device models and this applies to any 2 androids. (the tablet is a rooted galaxy s2 tablet and the phone is galaxy s8 snapdragon non rooted)
If i could find the location of the mount i could create a link-foldermount thing from the location of my phone's contents to the internal memory of the tablet so it would work as a wonder, the problem is that i can't find where the phone is mounted and yes i have tried mnt and storage folder-there is no usb folder as it would be for a normal flash drive.
Any ideas/suggestions?
Is there a way to download torrents using flud to a usb otg drive? I can only download to my sd card or internal storage. I am competent to edit configuration files.
I have a sony xperia z3 running stock marshmallow.
perambulate123 said:
Is there a way to download torrents using flud to a usb otg drive? I can only download to my sd card or internal storage. I am competent to edit configuration files.
I have a sony xperia z3 running stock marshmallow.
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Click to collapse
Did you find a solution?
Other than using a phone with an os that permitted this such as I think Kit Kat - no I didnt. I did discover a useful little trick though you might find interesting. There is a apk called UMS enabler (I think it is from an XDA developer - it is not on Google playstore) that allows (with a rooted phone) to plug in the phone and mount a micro sd card as a drive on your computer. With this you can do interesting things such as make playlists with media player classic or maybe vlc save the playlists to a folder on the micro sd card, and an android media player called Rocket will access them perfectly. Much faster than making playlists on your phone. I have lots of audiobooks, lectures from youtube in addition to music. Rocket player has its own database organizer. I had not found any other players at the time that would do this. I tried them all. I think some may now allow this, but after android 10 the android file database organizer would not permit this. I had given up on finding a way to mount a usb stick to download directly to - if I find it I will let you know. Cheers