Total Commander

Hi,

Earlier I was able to use Total Commander to stream videos from my samba share on another computer in my lan.
Yesterday when I tried this on my new Android 11 phone, I couldn't find how to stream a video any more.

Accessing the same samba share with LAN (windows shares) in Total Commander works fine.

Did this feature get removed, or am I just not setting it up properly?

Streaming from the same samba share in VLC for Android works fine.

Best regards,

akikoo

Edit: I just noticed there's a dedicated Android sub-forum. Please move this thread there.

Edit 2: The problem I have is that when I select "play (foreground)", Android doesn't let me choose a video player.
I have VLC for Android installed.

You can try defining an internal association. It has a special checkbox for "Play (foreground)" to define a player for that.
You can define it via main menu - Configure - Internal associations.

I can't make it work. By default for mkv files, Total Commander doesn't offer to play the file with VLC, just with Opera browser and
Solid explorer (both of which fail to play it). If I define that internal association, it doesn't work any better. Now the error message is "Multiple media cannot be played".

I'm having the same problem trying to play .mp4 files -- I must have read access to them in the Windows share, because I can copy them through Total Commander's clipboard. I can view pictures over the network through photo apps, but despite adding vlc player as a new association, Total Commander first reports that the file can't be played, then, if I repeat the process" that "Multiple media cannot be played".

"Multiple media cannot be played" isn't a Total Commander error. It must be the target app showing this error.

ghisler: Where are the older Total Commander for Android downloads? I can't find them. I could test an older version
because I know one of them worked with video streaming.

https://www.totalcommander.ch/android/?C=M;O=D
And there is a subfolder "old" for even older versions.

The error message disappears so quickly that I can only see "The location http://127.0.0.1/ ... cannot be played". The older versions didn't work for me either Not on Android 7.0 either.

Edit: could it be a problem with the LAN plugin?

Edit 2: it looks like the LAN plugin stays connected even though the video stream doesn't start.

Streaming from the LAN plugin works like this:
The LAN plugin creates a small local Web server. Then it starts downloading the media file and passes the data via the Web server to the media player. This is done because the Android media player only supports local files and streaming via a few protocols like http, but not via SMB.

The error means either that the player could not connect to the local Web server of the LAN plugin, or that the LAN plugin couldn't access the file, or the file isn't a streamable format. For example, AVI files cannot be streamed because the location of the video frames is stored at the END of the file. mp4 files can be streamed because all frames have special local headers which can be found just by looking at the stream.

My guess is that you phone unloads the LAN plugin or cuts its data transfer to save battery. Especially phones made by Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi or Huawei have very aggressive power saving functions.