Kodi Community Forum

Hey guys. First off, I'm a newbie in the raspberry and linux world. My goal is to get three devices to work together in the most convinient and fastest way.

My PC with win10
My Raspberry PI with Retropie+Kodi (latest versions each)
My External Harddrive which can also work as Multimedia Station (Icybox with HDD and its own OS and FTP/Samba NAS functionality)

I want to be able to send files from my pc to the HDD and then acess it with KODI.

Yesterday I connected the Box as external HDD using USB and then put it up as shared device via the raspberry's samba configuration. Then I could access the folders/files on the HDD with my PC the same way as the folders on the SD Card connected to the PI.
BUT
The speed was very slow (2mb/s). This is not fast enough.

So my second guess was, why not letting KODI stream from the Box via LAN connection.

The Box runs with Samba 3.xx or FTP.

But I did not "see" the Box' samba service /files within the network in my KODI application.

What would be the easiest way to access the Box with my KODI for playing files and also with my PC (which already works)?
//edit: ok nevermind, I just activated uPnP in the icybox and KODI found it and I could set it up as media path. Know it works like planned. Thanks anyway

Samba 3 (and Samba 2) do not allow browsing for sources, only SMB1 does. You can still access them, but you have to type their address manually.

So just make a note of what the access link is and type it into Kodi. Then it should work.

As for speeds, that would more likely be down to your network set-up than Kodi itself. How are the devices all connected together, via Ethernet cables or via wifi? And what is the speed of your router (via whichever protocol is used)?

I was connecting to the PI via LAN and the Speed accessing the SD card was fine (via samba network) but accessing the usb-hdd connected to the PI was veeeery slow. The HDD is formatted in ntfs btw. it would be hard to reformat it another format because atm I dont have the space elsewhere to backup the files on it

DarrenHill Wrote:So just make a note of what the access link is and type it into Kodi. Then it should work.

Where exactly would I add the adress? On my PC I see it as
\\Rtk1185
or
\\Rtk1185 (Samba 3.0.23c)

In my router I also can read out it's IP and MAC adress.
/EDIT: Nevermind, I could activate uPnP in the icybox and it worked to connect Kodi to it. Thanks anyway

For completeness, in kodi when you set up the smb shares and use the browse button in the past too find them, you can also directly type the address into the box (the one that got filled in after browsing).

(2017-11-10, 20:44)DarrenHill Wrote: [ -> ]For completeness, in kodi when you set up the smb shares and use the browse button in the past too find them, you can also directly type the address into the box (the one that got filled in after browsing).

I encountered another problem, everytime I restart the devices or at least the hdd, I have to re-connect with the unpn method.
Then I just added smb://rtk1185 et voila it worked instantly. Hadnt expected it to be that simple ^^

Thread marked solved.