Adding a Windows Share

[gordon1]

So just got my VeroV and trying to set it up, it has been a while with the Vero4.

I have all my media on a Windows 10 machine with a bunch of shares setup for each set of folders, like:

Which I want to add to the library of my new box. I remembered that in the past there was an issue with the older versions of SMB so I went in and set the minimum SMB version to SMBv1.

I have tried adding a source using the smb://user:password@SERVER/sharename/folder format, and kept getting errors.

As I was typing this I tried again, just to confirm my issue, and it worked. But rather than just delete this I am going to post it anyways in the hope that anyone else with the same issue sees this one before a lot of the older ones.

I got is working without the user:password bit, and don’t forget the last ‘/’ which I think I might have need doing wrong.

My info came from File sharing with a NAS, media server, windows share or other device

PS Thanks for the new box to mess with, just needs to recreate the libraries again now.

[darwindesign]

Since Windows 10/11 has disabled SMBv1 for some time now it is not recommended to force Kodi to try to use this protocol.

The first time you entered that UNC path with credentials Kodi split the credentials off and saved them in a passwords.xml file in your Kodi userdata folder so that is why you didn’t need to enter them again a second time around.

The optimal way to do this is to add a source and tell it to browse and in that window tell it to add a network location. In this screen you would enter just computer name or IP in the “Server Name” field, and your username and password (With modern windows you need to use credentials with a password since guest/passwordless access is disabled by default) and then click OK. The browse list will then have this new location and you can just browse to add new sources like you could with SMBv1.

[gordon1]

Thank you, I never saw that I could go ‘back’ from the browse field and bring up the previous add source from there, just did that with - smb://user:password@SERVER/ and then just fought my way to the OK button and added it and it seemed to work, so much less typing with that damn onscreen keyboard.

I will go back and unset the ‘minimum SMB version to SMBv1’ later, but I have about 15TB files being scanned right now.

I think parts of the interface are a little too ‘clean’ and you can miss bits if you aren’t aware they are available, but so far so good.

[angry.sardine]

It’s likely that you’ll get more than good enough performance doing what you’re doing; but if you find you don’t, then you may be able to improve things by using OS-level mounts:

Mounting network shares with autofs (alternative to fstab)

This how-to describes how to mount your network shares via autofs. Autofs should be as performant as fstab based mounting but has the advantage that your shares are mounted on demand which also should give you more reliability in case of network interuptions. First install the autofs package sudo apt-get install autofs If you already have mounted your shares already via fstab comment out that line in fstab and reboot. For this how-to we are going to use a directory for each server, if you wa…

[gordon1]

Thanks, but I think I looked at previously and saw the type a bunch of stuff into who knows where and then the cold sweats and the headache started as I read on.

I have a 1gig wired connection between the server and the Vero and never had any issues with playback, probably because I haven’t ripped anything at full BluRay.

[angry.sardine]

@gordon1

I have a 1gig wired connection between the server and the Vero

In that case it’s unlikely you’ll need to mess with OS-level mounts if you don’t want to. (But it is a lot simpler than it probably sounds! )