The VideoLAN Forums

I've had some trouble loading SMB-shared drives, but am now able to see them on Feisty. Problem is, I have all my videofiles on these external harddrives mounted on a computer in network. I can access these harddrives in Feisty and have full access. But I can't see them in VLC 0.8.6c, so I can't play them in VLC. Not only because VLC can't see the drives, but also because there are no choice in the context menus to play the files in VLC, only MoviePlayer.

Sorry for this jumbled post. A better organized list:

-Need Samba harddrives visible in VLC
-Need context menus to show a choice to "play in VLC"

Any help is appreciated.

I encountered this too. Here's what I discovered:

Using the browser in GNOME, when you access a file on an SMB share, the file path will be something like smb://server/share/file.avi
VLC apparently doesn't know how to handle the smb:// path.

In short, to fix the problem, you'll need to mount the filesystem to a directory on your computer. Try man smbmount (I think you need the smbfs package for this to work)

I apologize for the tardiness of my response. Thank you for pointing out to me that I am remiss in my knowledge of the GNU/Linux OS. I know of the man utility, I just didn't think far enough to think of it as a possibility. I'll give it a whirl and see what I turn up.

smb plugin does exist for vlc, but maybe it's not enabled by default in feisty builds

Where do I find this plugin?

in vlc source code (compile with --enable-smb)