I'm trying to view videos on a SMB share on another machine.After navigating to the share with Konqueror (using the smb:// url), I can right-click on any video and select "Open with..." and select a variety of players: noatun, kaboodle, kmplayer, VLC, xine, etc. However, none of them seem to work, except for VLC. Furthermore, VLC downloads the entire file to a tempfile before playing it, which seems an unnecessary delay.
All of the solutions I've found on Google involve mounting the share to the filesystem. I'd like to avoid this for several reasons. First, Windows doesn't have to do this, so I think Linux should be able to as well. Secondly, I sometimes want to play media from a variety of shares, and, being on a laptop that I take to places, they're not all available at the same time. I don't want to have to have a handful of mountpoints, and and have to manage which ones need to be mounted at any given time. Lastly, I've noticed that, if I have a share mounted, and then I suspend my laptop and take it someplace else, and then wake it at someplace from where I can't get to that share anymore, it causes Konqueror to just lock up for a couple of minutes.
If you can offer a mounting solution that avoids all of those problems, then I might pursue that avenue. Otherwise, I don't see why there isn't a player that can stream over SMB (or any other network protocol). Isn't VLC supposed to understand network streaming? Is there a change I need to make to KDE to get it to pass the URL of the file instead of downloading the file locally?
Lastly, if KDE is downloading the file locally, why don't noatun, kmplayer, and kaboodle working with it. From watching the network traffic, I can tell that KDE is downloading the file (just like with VLC) but, with VLC, I see a little download progress bar as the file downloads, then it finishes, then VLC gets launched. With the others, the player gets launched immediately, doesn't play anything, and then I see the network traffic. Anybody know why?
- Joe
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