Kodi Community Forum

Hi,

I apologize in advance for asking what may to most of you be obvious, but I struggle with the following:

I have KODI installed on my home HTPC in town. It plays content (ripped DVDs primarily) stored on a NAS in a different room, but connected to the same home network. Right now I am at my remote cabin, and I have brought with me a small PCm which I have managed to connect to my TV, get on the wireless network and I have successfully installed KODI. I have also tested and been able to access my home NAS remotely from here. However, I have not found a way to populate my KODI library with the content on the NAS. At home the NAS shows up on the home network, so that was very easy, but obviously that will not work here in at my cabin?

I have tried this: https://esausilva.com/2016/08/08/how-to-...n-manager/  but couldn't get it to work. I have also wondered whether I need to try something like this:
https://webdrive.com/ but aside from the issue of cost I would rather not have to rely on some 3tr party service sitting between my NAS and KODI if it can be avoided?

Any pointers, suggestions and comments to help steer me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated!

Personally I'd use the VPN server package in the DSM to host your own in-house server on the NAS and use that to connect your travelling device back to your home network via a suitable client.

Then it should work the same as it does when it's physically at home. This is of course presuming that your home and local network speeds (upload for home and download for local) are sufficient to work with supplying media across them.

Hi Darren. thanks for your reply. This is where I must reveal my total ignorance and admit I dont't really know what "VPN server package", "DSM" or "suitable client" mean. I am not an IT guy, I just like to watch movies :-)
Any assistance on these terms and which practical detailed steps I should take will be very gratefully received!

My home network speed should be OK (80/80 MB/s), more sceptical of the radio network used at my cabin (10/10), but I do stream Netflix in HD without trouble, although probably not 4K.

Found something called VPN Server on the Synology Package Center tab when managing the Synology using QuickConnect. Installed and opened it, but that is way beyond anything I understand..

Any harm in trying Webdrive to see if it is easy to use? I assume it should be, since they want to get paid to provide something I already should have access to for free?

No idea, never heard of Webdrive.

The VPN side of things is outside of what we support here, but there are plenty of resources online which would help you do it. The NAS server is quite easy to set up, and it will provide you with a configuration file that you can use with a Windows client (outside of Kodi).

Your speeds should be fine to support what you're trying to do. And that's the package you need (plus an OpenVPN client for the travelling device).

As this would be outside of Kodi, I'll move this to the off-topic section as it's more appropriate there. But such dialling back into your home network to access your home resources is one of the acceptable usages of VPNs with Kodi (as reflected in our VPN policy (wiki)).

Editted to add - see here for more details. Look at the OpenVPN section of it.

From a quick look, Webdrive is just a WebDAV client, so wouldn't be any use for Kodi. But Kodi can access WebDAV sources natively anyway.

I probably wouldn't do it like that though - connection back is always the simplest and most secure way, plus you get all the other benefits of appearing to be physically back on your home network as if you were at home.