Accessing shared home-network folders from Android-TV via WiFi

[N2TE]

I've been using Android-VLC on my 2019 Sony smart HDTV for a bout 4 months now and have been able to easily access shared folders & files containing video content located on my Mac machine via my local WiFi home-network with no problems or issues. Once in a while it took VLC a little bit of time to connect to the machine. But it always connected. Recently, about a month or so ago VLC seemed to become somewhat finicky (?) about "connecting" to the network machine. It would connect quickly one day and then "spin" for minutes on end the next day before finally connecting. Sometimes VLC would ask for login credentials and other times it wouldn't and would quickly connect to my remote Mac machine. It was working fine!

Now it appears that VLC always asks me for my login credentials and then the on-screen "spining-hold-on-i'm-busy-connecting" busy indicator never stops spinning on the VCL screen on the TV. What could have changed? I don't think it's a authentication issue because one of the combinations of login credentials seems to be acceptable/valid and off it goes with the never-ending spinning busy indicator. Sometimes the busy indicator does stop and VLC puts me back at the "network browsing" screen showing just the top-level name of the intended Mac machine.

The "Sharing" settings in System Preferences on the Mac machine indicate that "sharing" (via smb://192.168.0.4) is enabled. I also have 4 other Linux machines on the same WiFi network that can access those same shared folders on the Mac machine using VLC with no issues. The issue is with my Android TV. VLC also can access video content on an external USB stick connected to the TV. I'm not quite sure how to troubleshoot this one. It shouldn't be this difficult. Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks.