Hello there,

I do use a Synology Nas server in my home network. What is the preferred way to access the nas from my laptop using a wifi connection and to just browse a folder and play a movie using the kde desktop?

I have tried several ways but nothing really works:

- I can't use fixed mount points since I'm using my laptop in other networks as well..
- phonon video players doesn't like smb:// at all (dragon player does nothing with a smb url and bangarang just says unexpected error). Note that I'm using phonon-gstreamer..
- using nfs:// doesn't works at all, dolphin can find anything..
- mplayer/smplayer actually does works with smb://, but wants to copy the movie to my local disk first which isn't really friendly with several gb over a wifi connection...
- smb4k actually works but I have to give super user rights to smb.mount manually and it doesn't feel very 'integrated' in the kde desktop..

Any more suggestions?

I'm using opensuse 11.3 with kde 4.6 from there repositories.

Regards and thanks in advance,
Jens

The best way to do it in this case is by using a system such as smb4k to mount the share into your system, which you can then use to play the movie file. Unfortunately most multimedia frameworks on Linux are not designed to support anything other than files mounted into the local filesystem.

Hi Jens,


I also used a samba share from a synology server and everything works fine. Here are few solutions that worked for me.

-- You can use autofs to mount your share only when you use it( meaning an application try to acces it). It only will work when you are at home . It is not mounted automatically at start up

-- You can use vlc ou Dragon Player to play a file ( more likely a video) from a shared folder which is not mounted ( browse your shares from the network folder in dolphin for example)

-- Amarok can acces i-tunes music shares. You can set this kind of share from the synology manager. Then open amarok and you collection will show up. The problem here is that I am not sure you can get album cover in amarok.


I hope I could help

Thanks to both of you for your suggestions and thanks for the pointer to Autofs, that one works pretty good.

Regards,
Jens

(PS: Are you sure you can play a movie from a share without the whole movie getting copied first?)

jp7677 wrote:Thanks to both of you for your suggestions and thanks for the pointer to Autofs, that one works pretty good.

Regards,
Jens

(PS: Are you sure you can play a movie from a share without the whole movie getting copied first?)

Autofs works great, nice and elegant solutions

About the movie thing.. depends on the software you are using and the way it buffers things.

On kde it usually works if it's a regular mount media and does not if it's a kio_slave like ftp

I can't play any video with vlc or kmplayer or dragon-player.
When I click on a video file in a samba (password protected) share vlc return me this error:

Your input can't be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL 'smb://admin@172.16.100.1/Stefano/f.avi'. Check the log for details.

while kmplayer and dragon-player simply don't play the video without errors.
I tried also adding the "X-KDE-Protocols=smb" line and "KDE;" in "Categories:" but it doesn't work.
Is the autofs the only way to play a video from a samba share?

VLC supports playing from a DLNA server. Just open the playlist, go to Local Network -> Universal Plug'n'Play, and it should bring up a list of any DLNA servers on your network.

Quite a few NAS devices come with DLNA media streaming services built in, but not all of them do.

I apologize for bumping an old topic but this thread cover the exact question I am wondering. Since this is a year old I wanted to check and see if Dragon Player has made any progress on using ftp? When I try, I got a pop up dialog saying it was possible if I installed a package. I click the search button, but it never finds it(maybe it is only searching my computer and not through repos?). It is rare I get the pop up, and it does not seem to be related to logging out or rebooting. Maybe some one can try this and see the package it mentions?

Got the pop up again:
http://i.imgur.com/gGfaa.jpg
I am trying to play straight from dolphin over ftp, not sftp..even if i use sftp I get the same pop up.

To watch the films from the NAS in my LAN i use the xbmc media center.

This probably means a native playback backend is available for the Phonon Backend currently in use. This will offer an optimum experience once installed. I would suggest checking which backend is in use in System Settings > Multimedia > Phonon, and then head to your package manager to search for ftp and the name of the backend (VLC, GStreamer, etc).

http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywo ... ection=all
Nothing is standing out to me.

Which Phonon backend are you using? GStreamer or VLC?

bcooksley wrote:Which Phonon backend are you using? GStreamer or VLC?

Gstreamer at the moment but I am pretty sure I tried VLC before and it made no difference. I can double check it later.

Please make sure gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad is installed.