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playing video over samba with mplayer


Guest Mr Bacardi
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Guest Mr Bacardi

i'm using mandrake 10.0 official with MPlayer 1.0pre4-3.3.2, and when I try to play a videofile from a share on another computer, mplayer tells me:

 

"Could not open from LAN: 'smb://user@10.42.42.200/F$/movie.avi' "

 

the file plays perfectly if i copy it to my machine and play it from there.

 

how do I enable mplayer to play files at other machines directly?

 

 

greetings

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How are you opening it? By CLI or browsing the playlist?

 

Im guessing the latter.

 

Firstly try making a mount point (do this in a terminal as root)

 

mkdir /mnt/media/
chmod -R 777 /mnt/media

mount 10.42.42.200/F$ /mnt/media -t smb -o rw,user

Now you should have mapped the F drive on the WinComp to /mnt/media

so just open /mnt/media/movie.avi

 

:D

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Guest Mr Bacardi
How are you opening it?  By CLI or browsing the playlist?

 

Im guessing the latter.

 

Firstly try making a mount point (do this in a terminal as root)

 

<!--QuoteEBegin-->mkdir /mnt/media/<!--QuoteEBegin-->chmod -R 777 /mnt/media<!--QuoteEBegin--><!--QuoteEBegin-->mount 10.42.42.200/F$ /mnt/media -t smb -o rw,user<!--QuoteEBegin-->

Now you should have mapped the F drive on the WinComp to /mnt/media

so just open /mnt/media/movie.avi

 

:D

 

thanks, I already considered mounting the share like that, but I was wondering if there was away around it, without mounting the directory, just to click the file in a share and it plays...

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Guest Mr Bacardi

I've noticed that it is possible to compile Mplayer with --enable-smb .... samba support.

 

I guess that means that you can play files directly from shares.

 

has anybody tried this and got it to work?

 

edit: I tried compiling mplayer with smb support, but it still won't play the files directly. the only difference is that when you click a videofile on a share, mplayer automaticly downloads it and plays it locally... :wall:

Edited by Mr Bacardi
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short answer for me is that samba shoudnt be used for playing video.

Of course you have the files on a windows box and thats not so helpful but SMB contains lots of weird things and misses other becuase its reading/writing to a FAT filesystem. This makes it slow etc. and the protcol for accessing it is really not nice. Samba is a great piece of compatibility SW but its over used.

 

It should be last resort...when you really have no choice but becuase it supports the network paradigm MS have pushed lots of ex-Windows people tend to use it.

NFS is much more efficient etc. not to mention faster which is important for mutlimedia and adhoc networking as implemented in windows is really ugly.

 

Hence the short answer is expect problems using windows specific protocols in Linux. The other way round SAMBA when acting as a server can do mangling etc. and make the linux stuff look OK to windows by handling the differences but using a Windows server and a Linux desktop is perhaps pushing the compatibility too hard... just my 2c.

 

I dont use windows at all so I have no use for Samba except at work but the idea of two linux machines sharing files by Samba is very wierd to me. I appreciate people coming from windows think about networking differently but this migfht well be an expectation thing ... in other words after you compile in support it might not work as expected asnd/or you will need to redo it the next version of mplayer...

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Guest Mr Bacardi

yeah, I have experienced that samba isn't very effective at filetransfering, thats why I use FTP for large filetransfers.

 

but samba is more than fast enough for mediaplayback (both Music- and Video-files) over the network.

 

I understand that it might get a little ugly when samba is trying to fit windows and it's filesystems, but in the end, the mediafile is only a long stream of bits that needs to get transfered a chunk at the time so that playback via the network is possible.

 

... and samba is able to access that bitstream on the windowsmachine

 

 

about NFS:

 

I haven't tried NFS myself, but how does it compare to samba or regular filesharing between windowsboxes in practical use? Is it possible to play mediafiles directly via the network with NFS? (like you can between windowsboxes)

 

is there any opensource or freeware NFS-implementation for the windows-platform out there?

 

 

http streaming:

 

I tried to play the videofile directly from the httpd-server on the windowsbox, and that works perfectly with mplayer. If only mplayer could support smb as well as http

Edited by Mr Bacardi
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Both NFS and Samba work kinda different than Windows networking.

 

The idea of browsing a network is new or at least Windows-ified because *nix has always used network drives... completely transparently but just accessed differently.

 

In Win a network drive is different, you have the whole C: D: M: paradigm whereas in *nix it looks the same, feels the same etc... in fact its just part of the file tree...(/)

 

Making smb a protcol is a step towards the 'network neighbourhood' ideal ...

or winifying linux....

 

is there any opensource or freeware NFS-implementation for the windows-platform out there?

 

 

good question ? but for your specific problem I doubt it would help.

Running smb:// as a mplayer protcol is one thing but as pointed out you can stastically mount and then browse it as a file-

 

I have my XBOX (running linux) with /mnt/media which is on another box and use mplayer to play video from it.. but I use static shares...

 

I havent worked out yet if you have a genuine reason that you dont want to make a static share or if your just thinking in Windows terms (thats a genuine question btw) so perhaps ask yourself why not a permanant mount (either smb or nfs)

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