Quick questions about shared folders and video output!

[77dima77]

Hello, first of all let me say thank you so much for the guides on this site! I am computer literate, but very new to linux. Without your guides it would have taken me an eternity to figure everything out on my own!

Here are the problems I have been having, if anyone has a second to help me out:

1) I am trying to access the shared folders on my XP box. I can see them fine in Nautilus, but when I attempt to open them, with VLC or MPlayer, nothing happens. Yet, if I copy the video file to the PS3 hard drive, it plays perfectly... What am I missing here? Do I have to somehow "mount" the shared folder? I have no idea how to do that, despite finding explicit directions all over the web!

2) After modifying the MPlayer config file to allow for fullscreen output (zoom=yes), I get big vertical green lines. Someone told me this is because hardware acceleration is blocked. Has anyone else had this problem, or found a solution? I have not tried full screen in VLC yet, but I will be doing that shortly.

3) I attempted to compile Xine player, but I messed up somewhere and it wouldn't install the xine "executable" or "binary". Now I have the Xine files in my trash, but it won't let me delete them unless I'm logged in as root. So I log out, log back in as root, and search the file system for the trash for my non-root user, and I can't find it... Can anyone help me out here? I tried rpm -e and rpm -qa to find the xine rpms but they weren't listed, so I don't know if that is somehow related.

Again, thank you guys so much for your hard work, I am totally new to Linux but so far everyone has been ridiculously helpful! It is very appreciated.

[asong26]

First of all, I am not running YDL, I run Gentoo. I did however, used to run YDL and ran into the same problem.

After much research, I think I read somewhere that in order for play any files streamed, you'll need a one of 2 thing:

1. A stream server setup on your winxp to broadcast the video
2. You can skip this and play the file directly off the shared drive via 'Mounted Network Drive'

Option 2 was easiest for me....

In order to do this, you'll need to install 'samba'. Samba allows your to map and mount a windows directory to your local linux OS. Once this is done, you can then use whatever the mount point you've used to play anything on your WinXP drive.

Search online for Samba install, and after the install follow the directions below:
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First, I created a directory in linux /mnt/Win_D_Drive (must be logged in as root to do this: you can 'su')

Here's a simple command to mount a network drive via command prompt on linux:

# smbmount //MYPC/D$ /mnt/Win_D_Drive -o username=userX,password=PasswordX,uid=1000,umask=0 00

The above command is a single line command!

Replace MYPC/D$ with YourPCName/SharedFolder
Replace userX with the Administrator user on your WinXP
Replace PasswordX with the Administrator user's password.

That's it! The mount should be successful as long as your user and password is setup correctly for the administrative privileges on your WinXP.

Once that's done, simply launch any application (including MPlayer, VLC, or whatever else) open file -> navigate to /mnt/Win_D_Drive in my example. Your mount name can be anything you want. You can just open the file and it will launch as if this is a local directory.

Goodluck!

[asong26]

One more point of clarification, I am not sure if the browsing network folders in Nautilus is equal to actually 'mounting' that folder to your local file system. Unless it's a mounted file system, I don't think it would work. And since, linux and windows file systems aren't compatible out of the box, you'll need to have a tool like samba to do that translation work for you.

So, don't skip samba. It's an amazing tool that translates the interactions between Linux and Windows, or any other operating systems behind the scenes.

Let me know how it goes! I am currently streaming a h264 file over the LAN, and playing that very file under 1080P resolution on my PS3 linux TV with no problems of slowdowns.

I am currently faced with an issue of correctly configuring Gentoo / KDE install. My audio doesn't initialize correctly. I hope to have this fixed soon. And when I do, I'll post a full step by step guide to installing Gentoo / KDE and the media players in the right way that is most optimized for PS3. I think I am currently running into audio drive conflicts between ALSA, ESD and OSS linux sound architectures. Just have to figure out how to get rid of ESD and OSS to use ALSA only....

If anyone knows how, please lend me hand.

[asong26]

Actually..., I may be mistaken about this. I believe there is a way.... Search and they shall find (internet)