I always seemed to have issues working live on a samba server. I have used many linux distros with the KDE desktop but none of which seemed to be able to open media and other document over the LAN for some reason.

Reading on the net over the years I understand KDE is unable to open media over a LAN - I find this hard to believe?

It seems the "location" of the media is not being passed to the application.

I have tried disabling firewall with no change.

is there a plugin that I need to install or setting that needs to change to allow applications such as Kdenlive, VLC etc to open media over a Workground LAN?

Thanks

Hello Andy,

You're not alone in this problem. What you are running into is something fundamental to KDE Plasma itself. You can see the ongoing posts in the Brainstorm here: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=141917

Unfortunately, when using Dolphin (KDE's file manager) to connect to a server, it uses a KDE tech known as KIO. KIO will let other programs see the connected share only if the application is written to use KIO. Therefore most generic gtk, qt5, and electron apps will not be able to see LAN shares on KDE. This is quite disheartening for most people who wish to use KDE Plasma with LAN media servers. My only piece of simple advise is to use Gnome and Nautilus (Gnome's file manager) to access server side video and documents. It uses GVFS which is more universal and offers user visible share paths.

I hope a few KDE developers might see these posts across the forum and offer us some advise on how to make Plasma work for us.

Sincerely,
ChrisHRD

ChrisHRD wrote:Hello Andy,

You're not alone in this problem. What you are running into is something fundamental to KDE Plasma itself. You can see the ongoing posts in the Brainstorm here: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=141917

Unfortunately, when using Dolphin (KDE's file manager) to connect to a server, it uses a KDE tech known as KIO. KIO will let other programs see the connected share only if the application is written to use KIO. Therefore most generic gtk, qt5, and electron apps will not be able to see LAN shares on KDE. This is quite disheartening for most people who wish to use KDE Plasma with LAN media servers. My only piece of simple advise is to use Gnome and Nautilus (Gnome's file manager) to access server side video and documents. It uses GVFS which is more universal and offers user visible share paths.

I hope a few KDE developers might see these posts across the forum and offer us some advise on how to make Plasma work for us.

Sincerely,
ChrisHRD

Many thanks for the Answer Chris. I wonder why KDE decided to go it alone using incompatible technologies - Seems only to hobble Dolphin. Maybe bundle GVFS with Dolphin may the the resolve. Lets hope they get the problem sorted.

Thanks

Andy

Well, the intent of KIO and GVFS is similar: provide network transparency to apps (let the subsystem deal with the ins and outs of connecting, authenticating, etc.). They both are a great deal easier to manage over setting up mount points and such yourself.

The main downside of KIO is that it only works with apps built to use KIO, which mainly means KDE apps (which you should be able to use kaffeine and kdenlive with the smb KIO to connect to the network share and watch or edit the videos there). I appreciate ChrisHRD posting the suggestion to have KIO set up mount points for things so that non-kde apps can also use them as I agree that will help quite a bit.

As for why KDE uses KIO instead of GVFS: mostly it's been separate evolution since GVFS is a Gnome technology. Providing mount points is a feature of the relatively recent iteration of GVFS, which just hasn't been implemented in KIO because nobody's asked for it until now. (I also like the idea of some kind of an FDO standard for uniting KIO and GVFS)

Airdrik, good to see another one of your posts on this topic. Regarding Kaffeine, the program doesn't have support for opening a remote video file via mouse click in Dolphin (despite being ported to Frameworks 5). I used the Nautilus/GVFS/Totem combination to reach the same file and the video played back instantly.

I was hoping that discussing the KIO/Dolphin/SMB issue on the forums would start a discussion as to the possible solutions; however, it does not seem to be getting very much traction. As a working solution, doesn't feel right to keep recommending Gnome and Nautilus, but what other choice do we have right now. Technically speaking, this design issue impacts every KDE user who has a network attached drive and with some form of content on there (video media previewing being the most problematic).

It's not really a bug because KIO is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing. Rather it is a missing feature that many average non-technical users would consider commonplace. Any thoughts on how to advance this discussion to the next stage, hopefully generating a more universal KDE-native solution?


Sidenote: I have a feeling that Plasma Mobile will become the de-facto standard on the Librem 5 phone. If the phone launches in 2019 (I'm very hopeful about this!), I believe that addressing this KIO issue will become even more relevant, IMHO.

I think the next step would be to move forward with that brainstorm feature to have KIO provide mount points for things (and possibly implementing a more desktop-agnostic solution like creating an FDO standard that both gvfs and kio implement, and that could be understood by things which don't use either).

For anyone still reading this thread. I have a solution (more or less: a non-kio workaround for dolphin). Download VLC (I have tested with 2.2.8+) and go into its preferences. Set show settings to "All." Then under Input/Codecs -> AccessModules -> SMB, add your SMB server's username, password and workgroup to VLC's settings. Set VLC to be your default media player.

Next time you view your SMB server in Dolphin, you should be able to double click on any movie to stream it instantly in VLC from your server. So far all my test devices have behaved as expected. Hope this helps.

Sincerely,
ChrisHRD

ChrisHRD wrote:Airdrik, good to see another one of your posts on this topic. Regarding Kaffeine, the program doesn't have support for opening a remote video file via mouse click in Dolphin (despite being ported to Frameworks 5). I used the Nautilus/GVFS/Totem combination to reach the same file and the video played back instantly.

Yes, Nautilus works well under KDE with servers. But in the past, in older KDE versions it was too easy to connect different servers. Even from Quanta plus I was able to edit web pages directly on the web servers.

Suddenly that convenience disappeared. So I was forced to switch to different graphical interfaces.
Now I got back to KDE because I found out that it is very improved and works fast without spending a lot of resources, but I consider this a disadvantage
Caja and Nautilus have also other conveniences, as easy finding files and so on.