[schotness]

A couple of days ago I saw a post asking how to access lan shares from the playbook & the answer was you cant. Sorry I couldnt find the original thread to reply to. Last night I tried using ES File Explorer an android app i converted & that worked fine I could access my C & D $ shares, without any problems. So obviously Samba functionality is present in the Playbook OS.

[pauldriver]

Yes, no, sorta, QNX has both a SMB server and client, the Playbook doesn't turn the client on, probably because Windows 7 and the SAMBA client software don't get along, actually Windows 7 / Server 2008 changed the way they talk, and this can even cause issues for older Windows clients.

ES File Explorer actually has an SMB browser built into it.

If your looking to access media files, there are various media streamers and transcoders available that will inter-operate with the Playbook.

[conix67]

Yes, no, sorta, QNX has both a SMB server and client, the Playbook doesn't turn the client on, probably because Windows 7 and the SAMBA client software don't get along, actually Windows 7 / Server 2008 changed the way they talk, and this can even cause issues for older Windows clients.

ES File Explorer actually has an SMB browser built into it.

If your looking to access media files, there are various media streamers and transcoders available that will inter-operate with the Playbook.

I'm quite certain RIM doesn't enable SAMBA client for business reasons. With that enabled, there's less of reason for people buying higher capacity models.

I sure wish RIM enables this functionality in native PB OS. ES explorer and other Android apps work ok but they can't link the files to PB native apps.

[peter9477]

I'm quite certain RIM doesn't enable SAMBA client for business reasons. With that enabled, there's less of reason for people buying higher capacity models.

And I'm equally certain that this is not the reason they haven't enabled it yet.

[pauldriver]

If you've attempted to attach a POSIX device using SAMBA to Windows 7 or Server 2008, you'll understand what the problem is.

[conix67]

If you've attempted to attach a POSIX device using SAMBA to Windows 7 or Server 2008, you'll understand what the problem is.

Pardon my ignorance but I'm not aware of any problems in the configuration you mentioned.

By the way, there's not a single good streaming solution available on PB. Subsonic comes close, but PB native client doesn't work well, and web client is not usable on 7" screen, and the total cost is relatively high.

[pauldriver]

The Playbook is quite cool in that it exposes all of it's codecs to the HTML5 video tag, this makes writing a simple HTML media streamer, well, simple.

Even I've done it, see HERE

Warning, it's got about 12 hours in it (mostly trying to document it), and it's kinda rough.

As far as SAMBA goes, WindowsNT6 extended SMB and broke a few things, it's fixed in the newer SAMBA builds, but embedded devices or installs with older SAMBA versions have difficulty seeing the shared folders.

Windows 7 also has issues with homegroups that make it difficult for *nix machines to see them.

Paul.

[RicThot]

Everytime the share topic is posted, it ends up in discussions about media streamer... This isn't the point of the discussion. The OP and many other users are not interested in running media servers or whatever, what we want/need is to be able to access network shares for file access, storage etc...

Sharing doesn't equal video/audio streaming necesserly. What if I want to access a corporate share at work from my PB? No-go.

I understand a lot of people requires share access for the purpose of streaming their medias to their PB, but this isn't the only use for shared drive access.

Btw, as far as I'm concerned, I never ever had any SAMBA issues on W7 x64 (Ultimate)...

Bottom line is, preventing straight network browsing FROM the PB is a big downer for many users.

[conix67]

Everytime the share topic is posted, it ends up in discussions about media streamer... This isn't the point of the discussion. The OP and many other users are not interested in running media servers or whatever, what we want/need is to be able to access network shares for file access, storage etc...

Sharing doesn't equal video/audio streaming necesserly. What if I want to access a corporate share at work from my PB? No-go.

I understand a lot of people requires share access for the purpose of streaming their medias to their PB, but this isn't the only use for shared drive access.

Btw, as far as I'm concerned, I never ever had any SAMBA issues on W7 x64 (Ultimate)...

Bottom line is, preventing straight network browsing FROM the PB is a big downer for many users.

You can do this on PB using ES explorer or ghost commander (with samba plug in) as OP stated, so what's the question.