HI all.
I want to mount a folder for a smb share.
I can access my smb folder, i play the file in it. (For that i use CxExplorer). I want to have a folder that is an access to that samba folder.
Because currently I can only access it through the Cx Explorer. And I would like to have that folder accessible from other applications. For example to play rom games in retroarch.
Thank you.
If you have root access on your Android TV, you can sideload
termux
and run
busybox mount -t cifs //192.168.1.2 -o username=user,password=pass /mnt/sdcard/smb
to mount a smb share system wide.
Not all apps can read from a Samba Share directly.
I use Solid Explorer on my Shield and my Phone... I don't have any drives "mounted" when I select a video that's on my Windows Shared folder I'm prompted as to which app should the file be opened with and I selct the App I want to use... In my case it's Nova Video and it plays fine.
The current version 4 release of Nova Video that's in the App Store can't connect to SMB 2/3 within the App yet. However there is a V5 experimental release that had SMB 2/3 support that you could try and install to see if it works
https://github.com/nova-video-player/aos-AVP/releases/tag/v5.13.0
Archos video player did the job for me. Had them on kodi but it was way to complicated to start with, and being a Sony Android tv, it was really slow. Archos is smooth and finds smb shares easily, and it creates a nice library out of those shares.
What about Android File Sharing?
Same boat.. I ended up using 2 tb USB HDD formatted as external disk ( you can't transfer files to it from file browsers, except if any app has the feature to create a subfolder with write access) just transfer ROMs to USB stick or USB HDD from PC/laptop and let retroarch scan the USB when connected to Android TV.
We can only request emulators like retroarch to add network location for roms as a feature. But considering the lag it will result , it may not be implemented.
You can use file browsers to access shared folders on network, but you can only transfer them files onto your internal space on TV, it just won't write onto the USB HDD.
What sort of consoles are you looking to play on TV ?
If you want only to play multimedia from network I would recommend vlc. It can connect to network and plays almost everything. On top is open source!