Hello. I have a question not directly related to Armbian, but to Linux in general. I just saw my problem fixed here and can't see how.

I have most of my multimedia on samba share in my local home network. In Windows i am able to play videos from this share with directly loaded external subtitles (when available). But from Linux it's not that easy, when open share in file manager (double click). In some cases even video/music/pictures can't load from players with some incorrect path errors, but let's say this worked in most cases and focus on subtitles. For some reason when opening videos in Linux with file manager from samba share, only video loads, not the external subtitles. This doesn't work for me with every regular Debian/Ubuntu based, official Linux i tried on my PC, from Thunar, PCManFM, Nautilus/Gnome. So i had to open video from terminal, with command like this:

mpv -–sub-file=smb://user:pass@path_to_samba_share_subtitle_file smb://user:pass@path_to_samba_share_video

But obviously, it's messy and uncomfortable. I've done a lot of searching and googling, but never find a solution for this. CIFS-mounts in fstab worked ok and i used this as workaround, but it's not so comfortable too.

 

Armbian acted the same way into this, as my desktop Linux for older versions. But in recent versions (in 5.24/5.25 for sure) this is fixed somehow and external subtitles loads in every player (i checked if it's player related) from regular samba share, mounted in file manager and file opened with double click. So, would you be so kind to share some info from the kitchen? How is the magic happen ?

Armbian acted the same way into this, as my desktop Linux for older versions. But in recent versions (in 5.24/5.25 for sure) this is fixed somehow and external subtitles loads in every player (i checked if it's player related) from regular samba share, mounted in file manager and file opened with double click. So, would you be so kind to share some info from the kitchen? How is the magic happen ?

I think it has something to do with SMB access method and mounting of the shares. If you had some incorrect path errors, then the file manager passed raw smb:// file path to the player and not all players support that (i.e. vlc requires installing additional plugin and even with it will happily throw you an error if there are spaces in file/directory names).

 

And it was probably "fixed" when we added additional packages to desktop images - gvfs-backends and gvfs-fuse. In this case file managers that support GVFS will mount SMB share locally so any players will access the path like a local FS and will easily pick up the external subtitles.

And it was probably "fixed" when we added additional packages to desktop images - gvfs-backends and gvfs-fuse. In this case file managers that support GVFS will mount SMB share locally so any players will access the path like a local FS and will easily pick up the external subtitles.

Thank you for your answer. Something really weird is going on here. I have those packages installed, even gvfs-bin. I wasn't install manual, they have to come automatically with Samba. I am sure subtitles wasn't load when i installed Xubuntu 16.04 x64 and samba. Now i checked and external subtitles are loading automatically from every player with double click. Must be fixed with some update. In Lubuntu/LXDE i had those packages installed manually, but there was the problem with file paths in players and programs. So this look like some different problem with PCManFM.

Anyway, thank's for the hint.

If you are able to reproduce this behavior on different images (old vs new Armbian, Ubuntu x86, ...) you can always check if shares were mounted (i.e. with output of "mount") and what kind of file paths were passed to the player (i.e. with htop)