Samba and video files on 770
 

I'm planning to buy an external NAS box to be used with a 3,5'' HD. The NAS supports SMB and FTP.

I know I can share those files through smbfs packages, but I'd like to know wheter or not once those files are accessed if there is any hope to play videos from the remote share. I remember I was able to do this when NFS was enabled, but I'd like to do it without having to keep a whole computer on (so that I thought about that NAS box)

Thanks in advance for your responses :)

Re: Samba and video files on 770
 

I thik fuse supports SMB. If you succeed in testing it, please let us know how it goes.

Re: Samba and video files on 770
 

Uhm... my intention was, basically, of browsing the shares and launch the video/audio/photo files from there...

Insn't it supposed to be done through the standard file manager once the share is mounted on my filesystem in an accessible directory?

Re: Samba and video files on 770
 

Hi,
I use SMB shares with CIFS kernel module on my desktop PC. It works fine. Once the share is mounted, I don't have to download a file to read it, it behaves like a local disk. Very useful for big files like movies or directories with lots of pictures, so you can see thumbnails.
I'll test it soon on my N800, but for movies I don't expect same results as on my PC, because of high quality and resolution : the N800 will have to manage (lots of) data download, sound decoding, image decoding, scaling... at the same time.

I think the best solution, at the moment, is to use a video on-demand server which will transcode to lower resolution/framerate/bitrate.

FYI : I'm testing a VLC server for few days, I encode TV broadcasts ("live"), so I can use mplayer on my N800 to watch my favourite TV channel everywhere. It works quite well, with WIFI (but be sure to have a very reliable connection for HTTP transport) or Bluetooth/UMTS.
I capture video in 640x480, encode in 192Kbps and resize to 320x240, so quality is very acceptable on the N800 screen. Sound is 16000Hz, encoded in 32Kbps. I use ASF format, MPEG4 codec for video and MP3 for sound.

Mplayer works fine but only with SDL. The XV driver is very experimental, it seems to be promising but at the moment, it freezes often and sometimes reboots all the system. X11 driver is too slow.
If you want to use Mplayer, don't forget to activate framedrop, and increase cache size (2048Kb was the minimum for my tests).

Re: Samba and video files on 770
 

Thanks for your infos. I was planning to do some experiment during this weekend but did not managed to do it. I'll try the next one :)

The only thing I was "scared" of, was regarding the amount of data to be passed through the wifi connection. I have already a bunch of files encoded for the 770, so the question is: will a file encoded for 770 (basically, 190-210 kbs) perform well if read through a SMB share instead of being read from the card?

I have a decent Wifi-G field extension over the place I want to use the 770 to view the videos, so I'm quite hopeful about that.

Omar

Re: Samba and video files on 770
 

I think it should work well. During my tests I tried to encode to 512Kps and it worked quite well with HTTP transport with WIFI connection. I use 192Kbps encoding when I'm not at home and use a 3G connection.

Re: Samba and video files on 770
 

tried to install smbfs this noon but I get an error...

Maemo 2.1 - know that it already includes cifs module, so, do I need anything more to access SMB shares, (meaning: do I have to mess with the smbfs "Some packages could not be authenticated" error), or can I proceed straightforward to the connection tests?

/*edit*/ reading http://maemo.org/maemowiki/HowToAccessWindowsCIFS seems nothing is needed except XTerm (and I already know there are some scripts to automate all of the things written in that page :) ) /*edit*/

Omar

Re: Samba and video files on 770
 

On OS2006 and OS2007 you have to download the kernel module and use "insmod" to load it, since it is not compiled in.

I tested last night CIFS. As I already had recompiled my kernel with CIFS built-in support, I don't need a module. To mount shares I use "mount -t cifs //192.168.xxx.xxx/MyShare /mount/point -o username=myuser -o password=mypassword".

It works very fine for video on my N800, even if I lost some FPS. These are the reports from mplayer :

From SD card :

From CIFS network share :