vlc does not play files from a "bookmarked" smb share

[Yattletrot]

When using Nautilus to create shares to a NAS box, using smbfs/cifs, vlc will not play the files saying that it does not have smb:// support. I believe that vlc actually supports it, but it seems that it is not on by default in Hardy Beta.

[Yattletrot (yattletrot-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

Sorry original description is wrong: I am creating the connection and bookmarks via Places -> Connect to server -> Windows share

When trying to play audio and video files, the vlc error message is this:

Unable to open 'smb://<ip address of NAS box>/<share>/<file name>'

Hamish

[Yattletrot (yattletrot-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

lspci -vvnn

[Yattletrot (yattletrot-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

This does not work in Hardy Final either

Hamish

[Mrts (mrts)]

The problem lies in Nautilus GVFS integration.

When you open a file from Nautilus with VLC, it fails with "Unable to open 'smb://foo/bar/file'", so it looks like Nautilus is hinting VLC to use the SMB protocol instead just giving the GVFS mount point.

However, using VLC -> Open File -> choose the SMB mount from the left panel -> coose file, the file is correctly opened. VLC doesn't attempt to use smb:// in this case, just uses the GVFS mount point ~/.gvfs/bar on foo/file

[Mrts (mrts)]

In summary, Nautilus should be fixed to pass the file path from the local filesystem GVFS mount point to VLC, not as a SMB link.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

that is not a gvfs issue

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

nor a nautilus one, the argument use depends of the % type used in the .desktop, if vlc doesn't understand vfs uris it should not claim those

[Saulius Menkevičius (saulius-menkevicius)]

ghm, vlc uses "vlc %U" in its desktop file, where %U means "a list of url's" in desktop file spec.

so i guess there isn't an easy solution here:
 * making Exec in .desktop "vlc %F" (%F - list of files) will make vlc not handle http://, ftp://, etc. urls, which it can handle properly
 * adding plugin to vlc for gvfs which is enabled by default in gnome environment would be a preferrable solution, but i don't know how hard it is to detect that we have gvfs available in vlc code..

[Iron Bishop (ironbishop)]

Almost the same problem occurs when I try to play a movie from my NAS, connecting by FTP: both Totem and VLC refuses to play the movie.

I tryed to play both "ftp://nas/folder/movie.avi" and "~/.gvfs/nas/folder/movie.avi" URL: in the first case I got the "Unable to open" error. In the second case I see network being in use and bytes passing from NAS to PC, then after some time (like 2 minutes) VLC shows the first fwe seconds (like 4) of the movie, then it hangs there showing that same frame (like in "pause"). VLC process is not frozen. After some other time, network activity goes down (maybe because of FTP timeout?).

Something `top' says while
  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
 6017 user 20 0 50596 4168 2616 R 37.0 0.5 9:31.94 gvfsd-ftp
 5350 root 20 0 408m 114m 26m S 26.3 15.1 7:37.41 Xorg
 5716 user 20 0 71264 2780 1768 S 4.3 0.4 0:33.16 gvfs-fuse-daemo
 8326 user 20 0 99068 20m 12m S 2.3 2.7 0:06.23 vlc

Attached vlc output.

[jrennell (jrennell)]

It might also be worthy to note that this issue can be caused with the way VLC handles the SMB access. If you are trying to connect to an SMB share through VLC it will apparently use its own "SMB Access Module" which looks to default to using the current username and no password. This can be changed in the VLC settings to use a different username/pass/workgroup.

This can cause a problem if you're accessing a windows share that requires a password, or if the username you're using requires a password on the windows share. For me, I have the user "jrennell" on the windows machine where my media is and I log into Ubuntu with "jrennell". Since "jrennell" is a user on the windows machine, trying to log in as "jrennell" with a blank password was not allowed. Changing the access module to "anonymous" allowed me to open files from nautilus without a problem.

I had the exact problem described in this bug report, and could open then from the "file > open file" method through VLC.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Is this symptom still reproducible in 8.10 or 9.04?

[Saulius Menkevičius (saulius-menkevicius)]

i can confirm this works for me now on 8.10 (vlc opens file using ssh:// mount on nautilus/gvfs)

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Great, closing as fixed then.

[Vineet Menon (mvineetmenon)]

No. I can confirm.

SFTP (basically SSH) mounts from nautilus can be opened from vlc, but not FTP and possibly SMB as well.

With FTP mount the symptoms are exactly as https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vlc/+bug/211632/comments/9