After I recently upgraded my Linux Mint I noticed that VLC (my preferred multimedia player) was unable to play a playlist I created. The playlist contains a list of songs which are all stored on a central NAS, accessible through a Samba (SMB) share.
Instead of loading the playlist and starting the play the songs, VLC would return an error on each playlist entry:
Your input can't be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL 'smb://nas/Music/Song.mp3'. Check the log for details.
However when using another audio player (for example Rhythmbox), the playlist and songs played just fine. This means a Samba share access/permission problem can be ruled out.
While researching this error, I came across a very helpful post, which focuses on the same error but was caused by Samba permissions. However the post helped made me aware of the (vast!) VLC internal settings.
In VLC, use [CTLR]+[P] key combo (or Tools -> Preferences) to open the Preferences window. At the bottom of the Preferences window switch to "All" to show all settings:
Then I wanted to verify the Samba settings (as suggested in the linked post) under Input / Codecs -> Access modules -> SMB. But... there is no SMB entry!
What the... ?!
Could it be that this setting is somehow "outside" the default VLC package and moved into a separate/optional package? Kind of the same way Nginx modules are now handled? Let's check the currently installed vlc packages:
ckadm@mintp ~ $ dpkg -l|grep vlc
ii libvlc-bin:amd64 3.0.9.2-1 amd64 tools for VLC's base library
ii libvlc5:amd64 3.0.9.2-1 amd64 multimedia player and streamer library
rc libvlccore8 2.2.2-5ubuntu0.16.04.4 amd64 base library for VLC and its modules
ii libvlccore9:amd64 3.0.9.2-1 amd64 base library for VLC and its modules
ii phonon4qt5-backend-vlc:amd64 0.11.1-1build1 amd64 Phonon4Qt5 VLC backend
ii vlc 3.0.9.2-1 amd64 multimedia player and streamer
ii vlc-bin 3.0.9.2-1 amd64 binaries from VLC
ii vlc-data 3.0.9.2-1 all common data for VLC
ii vlc-l10n 3.0.9.2-1 all translations for VLC
rc vlc-nox 2.2.2-5ubuntu0.16.04.4 amd64 multimedia player and streamer (without X support)
ii vlc-plugin-base:amd64 3.0.9.2-1 amd64 multimedia player and streamer (base plugins)
ii vlc-plugin-notify:amd64 3.0.9.2-1 amd64 LibNotify plugin for VLC
ii vlc-plugin-qt:amd64 3.0.9.2-1 amd64 multimedia player and streamer (Qt plugin)
ii vlc-plugin-skins2:amd64 3.0.9.2-1 amd64 multimedia player and streamer (Skins2 plugin)
ii vlc-plugin-video-output:amd64 3.0.9.2-1 amd64 multimedia player and streamer (video output plugins)
ii vlc-plugin-video-splitter:amd64 3.0.9.2-1 amd64 multimedia player and streamer (video splitter plugins)
ii vlc-plugin-visualization:amd64 3.0.9.2-1 amd64 multimedia player and streamer (visualization plugins)
There are indeed separate plugin packages! Let's search for samba:
ckadm@mintp ~ $ sudo apt-cache search vlc|grep -i samba
vlc-plugin-samba - Samba plugin for VLC
Ha! Gotcha!
Let's install:
ckadm@mintp ~ $ sudo apt-get install vlc-plugin-samba
In case VLC is still open at this point, close (quit) the VLC program.
After a new VLC start, the SMB setting now shows up and playback of files/songs located on the Samba share now work again!
No comments yet.
AWS Android Ansible Apache Apple Atlassian BSD Backup Bash Bluecoat CMS Chef Cloud Coding Consul Containers CouchDB DB DNS Database Databases Docker ELK Elasticsearch Filebeat FreeBSD Galera Git GlusterFS Grafana Graphics HAProxy HTML Hacks Hardware Icinga Influx Internet Java KVM Kibana Kodi Kubernetes LVM LXC Linux Logstash Mac Macintosh Mail MariaDB Minio MongoDB Monitoring Multimedia MySQL NFS Nagios Network Nginx OSSEC OTRS Observability Office OpenSearch PGSQL PHP Perl Personal PostgreSQL Postgres PowerDNS Proxmox Proxy Python Rancher Rant Redis Roundcube SSL Samba Seafile Security Shell SmartOS Solaris Surveillance Systemd TLS Tomcat Ubuntu Unix VMWare VMware Varnish Virtualization Windows Wireless Wordpress Wyse ZFS Zoneminder