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Using mplayer over SMB (Samba) Connection

I am having a problem accessing video with Mplayer over a samba connection. I have samba installed and running. I can see the files on the WinXP box and can move/copy etc over the connection, but if I try to play the video directly I get a message

No Stream found to handle URL SMB://JXP/Shared/Files/Video/Test.mpg

I get the same message for other file types (flv, avi, mp3 etc.). I have also tried mp3's using amarok and get a message there about no suitable plugin found. The files play fine if I copy it locally then play it on the local drive on the linux machine.

I am somewhat of a newbie, so I'm not having a lot of luck getting this figured out. I have searched on similar issues and have tried mounting the samba share first as suggested in another post, but still same issue.

Is this something samba or with the mplayer? From the documentation for mplayer it says it should handle playing over the SMB connection.

I am running fedora x86-64 release 8 kernel 2.6.23.14-115.fc8 and Gnome 2.20.2 on an intel celeron 1.6ghz processor.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Hello jlatl69

Quite a lot of Linux applications will have trouble accessing data over a network where the path begins smb://

The smb:// path is something fairly new and not all linux distributions/desktops follow that convention.

The best way round the problem is to explicitly mount your remote filesystem in the local one.

If you issue the following command as root:

Code:

mount -t cifs //JXP/Shared/Files/Video /mnt -o username=<yoursambausername>

after being prompted for you samba user password.

you will find that you can access the contents of your JXP/Shared/Files/Video directory directly under /mnt on the local machine.

The applications will be happy to access the information there.

You may have to substitute the JXP designation with the ip address of the remote machine depending on how your machine is set up.

You can vary the location your remote share is mounted to suit. I specified /mnt as most distributions have that directory but you can use anothe or create one for yourself.