Nexus player trouble seeing external hard drive

Nexus player trouble seeing external hard drive - Printable Version

+- Kodi Community Forum (https://forum.kodi.tv)
+-- Forum: Support (https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=33)
+--- Forum: General Support (https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=111)
+---- Forum: Android (https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=164)
+---- Thread: Nexus player trouble seeing external hard drive (/showthread.php?tid=222458)

Nexus player trouble seeing external hard drive - darkalbino - 2015-03-26

I have a WD Passport 2TB hard drive hooked directly into my nexus player, and I'm having trouble accessing it.

It doesn't appear to be listed under mnt or anything when using Kodi. At first I thought the hardware may just be incapable due to drivers or something, but when running ES File Explorer I was able to immediately find it - the path is "usb://2005/" according to ES, so I put exactly that into a video source, but it tells me the path is invalid.

So it seems that the player is capable of reading the hard drive, but perhaps kodi needs a different path format. Any ideas on how I can navigate to this hard drive through Kodi?

Thanks for any help.

RE: Nexus player trouble seeing external hard drive - darkalbino - 2015-03-28

Has no one done anything similar to this? I can even open a media file from ES File Explorer and tell it to open with Kodi, and it plays fine. It says that the file is located at "usb/2005/...", but Kodi's file explorer is unable to navigate there.

Does ES have access to some black magic that Kodi does not?

Nexus player trouble seeing external hard drive - Canyaya - 2015-03-28

Make sure that kodi's settings are set to view hidden files.

RE: Nexus player trouble seeing external hard drive - darkalbino - 2015-03-28

Thanks for the comment Canyaya. It was not set to view hidden files, but after enabling that it still didn't show.

I finally got this working after much tinkering. It required rooting the nexus player and flashing supersu, then installing LinuxSE and stickmount. Stickmount mounts the hard drive and maps a folder that other applications can use to access the drive. I guess there is some security thing in android that stops stickmount from doing this (even with root access), and LinuxSE disables that. There may be some additional crap I did in there, as I was messing around a lot. But those are the main pieces. After all that, I restarted it.

I still have no idea how ES can access the drive without jumping through all these hoops. It would be cool if Kodi could replicate that behavior. Anyways, hopefully this saves someone many hours.

RE: Nexus player trouble seeing external hard drive - wolfbiker - 2015-03-31

You could always plug it into your router and share it over your network that way rather than plug it directly into the Nexus Player.

RE: Nexus player trouble seeing external hard drive - IcI_K - 2015-06-01

Same problem here.

Amiko A3 running Jellybean 4.2.2. I can access the drive using any other file explorer, but I can't add the location as a source inside of Kodi 14.2 (ARM).

As others have stated, this seems to be an issue that many search for

Looking for a solution.

RE: Nexus player trouble seeing external hard drive - IcI_K - 2015-06-01

(2015-03-31, 02:32)wolfbiker Wrote: ... plug it into your router and share it over your network ...

@wolfbiker, you are correct. It does introduce two new problems though.

The external hard drive is now stored with your router (possible in some dusty closet) instead of close to your media player (and easier accessible)
Anything travelling across the network introduces extra complexity and delay (especially over Wi-Fi)

RE: Nexus player trouble seeing external hard drive - IcI_K - 2015-06-01

mhalfadl might have the answer for you in this post.

I did something similar:

System -> File Manager -> Add Source
Browse to Root File System -> /storage -> /external_storage -> /hdx

Now I have hdx listed in the sources and could easily select it to add videos / music.