Failure to Share Media in Person

I had some family over and my brother wanted to show everyone some videos he created.  He had copies of the video on a Micro SD card.  The problem is my entertainment center in my living room doesn't really support in-person sharing.  I have two devices hooked up to my TV that could play media.  The first is a Windows PC.  This is my gaming PC.  The PC isn't in my living room, though.  It is in my crawlspace under the living room.  I ran HDMI and USB cables from the crawlspace to the living room.  Due to the length of the USB cables, they don't work well for data transfer.  The USB cables are for game controllers.  My brother tried plugging in his Samsung Note and the device wouldn't event recognize the USB connection.

My second device is my MK802 III.  This is the primary display for my TV.  I have MX Player Pro installed.  I put in the Micro SD card, but I didn't know how to "mount" the card at the time.  The only time I use the SD card slot is when I travel with the MK802.  When you boot the MK802 with an SD card in it, the card gets mounted on boot.  After everyone left (when there was less pressure to get it to work) I found the menu option to mount the SD card.

This drove my brother nuts.  All this technology and it wasn't usable for him.  We settled on plugging the SD card into my laptop, then copying the files over SMB and Wifi.  These were HD video clips, though.  Needless to say, it was going to take a while.  The clips were available on Youtube, though.  So, we fired up the Youtube app on the MK802 and immediately ran into issues.  The problem was the MK802 was connecting over Wifi.  While I do have 3 access points in my house, the laptop and MK802 were right next to the one access point.  On top of that, some family members were on their phones and tablets browsing the internet.  My Wifi bandwidth was exhausted.

We switched back to the gaming PC.  My brother fired up IE to go to Youtube and started making fun of me more.  Adobe Flash wasn't installed.  He started saying how I never use the PC and I fired back saying who uses IE?  Google Chrome was installed....and running....with Youtube already opened!  He started playing videos in Chrome and noticed the taskbar wasn't going away when he put the video in fullscreen mode.  I started to talk about how this was a bug in Windows 7 and he cut me off talking about how it doesn't happen to him.

I need to find a better way for people to come over and transfer video.  I should plug an ethernet cable into my MK802.  Since the MK802 is rooted, I should install a Samba server so that other guests can download the files while we are watching them.  I also should do some testing to make sure I can plug in a USB Mass Storage device.  It is much easier to plug in the SD card into a USB reader rather than the slot in the MK802.  The MK802 is semi-hidden while the USB Hub that connects to it is more easily accessible.