Becoming the owner of a TV on Android, immediately checked and confirmed the sad reality of android existence: it does not know how to go to SMB-resources (balls, or Windows Network). Despite the fact that all this business is three hundred years old on Saturday, and the once-existing “multimedia consoles” were originally just for this purpose. Because it is very convenient not to plug all sorts of stupid flash drives into the TV, and get on the home server and watch from there.
“Iskaropki” android TVs are able to DLNA – a crooked technology, which, however, is implemented at the system level since Win7 (also crooked). The crookedness is that it will not play all formats that theoretically supports the TV. In some cases, it starts transcoding procedure (converting a stream from a file to a stream with a different codec), which makes additional demands on the server itself (you can’t adapt a slow machine). In general – people obviously did not look for easy ways, inventing an ugly bicycle for no clear reason.
Searching for an android application for normal display of SMB-resources took a decent amount of time. On the first lines of the search was some Network Browser, which, despite all attempts, showed nothing. At some point I came across X-plore File Manager, which also showed nothing at once, until I turned off the SMB2 option in the settings. After that the application connected to my Win7 server without any problems, and everything started working right away.
Searching for an android application for normal display of SMB resources took a decent amount of time. On the first lines of the search was some Network Browser, which, despite all attempts, showed nothing. At some point I came across X-plore File Manager, which also showed nothing at once, until I turned off the SMB2 option in the settings. After that the application connected to my server on Win7 without any problems and showed everything right away. Probably, if I had Win10 everything would have worked at once (but the developers, apparently, are not looking for easy ways either).
The only complaint with X-plore File Manager is a strange video player, which for some reason is not disabled, although the corresponding checkbox is checked. This video player does not fast-forward to the beginning of the movie, and it also remembers the last position of the viewer. That is, if you watched the movie up to half, then for some reason turned off the TV, then returned to the movie again – it will start playing from half. It seems convenient – but to go back to the very beginning – you will have to poke and poke “back” a hundred times.
Without registration I noticed only a small incomprehensible icon, which the program shows on the video in the upper left corner, It looks like some kind of beer mug, by God; it’s not even clear what they wanted to represent. I didn’t click on the icon, of course, so what the hell with it. Everything works.
