The VideoLAN Forums

Lot of thanks for creating the awesome VLC app for iOS! I've been using it to play videos on iPad during long flight so I can stop using the awful inflight entertainment system!

I have a feature request: could you please make the VLC app download video files directly from local SMB shares? Please let me explain the use case scenario:

Currently the way I get video files downloaded to the VLC app is thru the built-in file server: dropping video files in the browser window on my laptop. However since the files are located on my NAS device via SMB, effectively my laptop is relaying the video files to the iPad. My laptop and iPad both connect via Wi-Fi, the NAS->Laptop->iPad roundabout basically cuts the Wi-Fi throughput in halves. Not to mention the instability of the built-in file server causes transfers to halt midway and the iPad must be kept awake all the time.

It would be a great improvement if VLC app can directly download video files from SMB in the the Local Network section, either by drag-n-drop or enter into a selection mode to tap and choose target files to download. Then the download will be from NAS->iPad without involving another computer!

We will make downloads from SMB available in subsequent releases of VLC-iOS. This is definitely on our list!

Right now is possible to use FTP to transfer from NAS to iPad?

Yes, downloads via FTP and UPnP are supported as well as from all the Cloud services (and of course via drag and drop through the Web UI aka "WiFi Sharing").

Thanks atm2k for this suggestion. This is exactly what I have been hoping for.

And thanks to Felix for having this feature in the pipeline! Would it be possible to make it available on Android version as well please? BTW, Android version doesn't even have 'WiFi Download' feature either. One big gap compared to iOS version, and it's so inconvenient to use inferior app like AirDroid to transfer files!

Thanks,
HiGeoff

I had been looking into using VLC for playing FLAC music on my phone until I visited my parents house and found out I could access our local servers which hold our movies and tv shows. After playing with the app for a while I came across two features that would make the experience even better. First is from the topic of the thread which is downloading from SMB. Accessing the servers is easy playing videos off the servers even easier but it would be nice to copy the files to the app without using my computer which I didn't bring with me. I was really excited to see that this feature is on the list of things to do and I am curious how it is coming along.

The second feature I came across is the ability for VLC to recognize .dvdmedia files. Rather than opening the file and running it as the computer does, VLC opens the file to view the videots and audiots files. The app runs these files no problem but not the entire movie at once but rather in 30 minute clips for each file.

None of this seems to work on android which is super frustrating.

I came from iphone and sucks to see that i can't do wifi transfer without a 3rd party app.
And that upnp downloading also doesn't work.
And I'm on the 2.5.6 beta version of the app even

Hello,

I believe that you should post those issues on the Android side of the forum which you can find here.

I just hopped onto the forums to report the same thing. I'm using VLC on my AppleTV because it's the only thing I've been able to find that can see my NAS box and let me browse it so I can play my movies WITHOUT requiring a connected Mac computer in the mix. Unlike VLC on my Mac, VLC on tvOS doesn't properly recognize *.dvdmedia files - it just treats them like folders revealing there VIDEO_TS and *.vob file gizzards. Obviously I'd like to play my dvdmedia movies just like on my Mac by being able to select the dvdmedia files (actually, packages).

I also have VLC on the AppleTV setup to automatically advance to the next "movie" so if I play the first vob it does indeed advance to the next one, but there is a really annoying pause during the transition disrupting the movie watching experience.

Finally, while browsing my NAS box full of *.dvdmedia files, the browsing experience is kind of horrible - I can only see about a dozen movies at a time because the browsing window is in icon view (and the icons are all the same and all huge) so I'm scrolling for ever trying to find what I want. And to make matters worse, the icons aren't alphabetically sorted (I think it's by modification date).

Is this the right place to report the above as a bug? This is more a forum for discussion so things might get lost in the noise without actually ending up getting registered as a bug.

Just bumping my previous post. How do I go about officially reporting a bug for the tvOS version?

We will make downloads from SMB available in subsequent releases of VLC-iOS. This is definitely on our list!

Any chance this feature might see the day of light?