Help CIFS or NFS support?

[Claghorn]

It would be nice to be able to mount network filesystems on my new Nexus 7. Anyone know if the kernel has cifs or nfs support built in, or if the modules are available to add to the stock kernel?

Or better yet, if there is a fuse implementation of cifs with android support?

 

[John Bean]

I'm not aware of any. To be honest I stopped looking once I realised I didn't really need to work from a CIFS mount, just be able to access/copy/stream media from/to it - which I can easily do without the need to have it globally accessible.

Generally I use ES Explorer for everything - it even has a built-in streamer - but I also use Media House specifically for streaming, it works rather well. The only other things I use CIFS for (rsync, for example) can also access it without the need for a global mount, so I stopped looking for a solution to a problem I don't have

 

[Claghorn]

I see the word "streaming" tossed around a lot, but as near as I can tell it doesn't really mean that . With a "real" cifs mount I can just run any old media player and it can seek in the file, etc. A lot of the so-called streaming solutions really just copy the whole thing to a temp file first (that certainly appears to be what ES file explorer does from all I've read).

 

[John Bean]

Not really. ES Explorer buffers the file content but it doesn't copy it whole before making it available as a HTTP stream using its internal web server, it becomes available instantly no matter how big the source file.

Media House uses a completely different (and better) approach by serving (streaming) content using DLNA so it doesn't actually use the CIFS protocol at all; the end user experience is much the same though, so long as you're displaying the content on the Android device rather than on a remote renderer like (say) a smart TV.

For my uses I really can't think of any advantage to mounting a CIFS share on Android the way I do on a desktop system. On the desktop system that's pretty much the only way to access the content, but I can do that anyway on the Nexus without mounting it first.

 

[Claghorn]

I can do http streaming directly from my linux box, but it breaks down when I pause the video and let the nexus go to sleep. Things seem to have trouble recovering from pause and picking up where they left off. A real CIFS mount should avoid that problem (unless, of course, it turns out that the mount gets disconnected when the nexus sleeps .

 

[John Bean]

Yes, that does happen to me too - my NAS is basically just a Linux box.

The instability using HTTP streaming from a CIFS share is the reason I prefer to use Media House on Android for streaming, it requires that a DLNA-compliant server is running at source (I use Twonky but there are others) then everything works perfectly.

As an aside my TV can also connect directly to the same NAS using either CIFS or DLNA but like the Nexus it works far better with fewer glitches using DLNA/Twonky rather than reading the files itself on a CIFS share, so perhaps the Nexus isn't really the culprit.

I needed DLNA for other devices anyway, mainly my Philips Streamium music player that only works with uPNP/DLNA servers, so for me it was a no-brainer. YMMV of course

 

[Claghorn]

I see MX Player finally got an update for 4.3, and it seems to be clever enough to use the httpd support for resuming downloads so it can pick up where it left off. I guess that's good enough for my media player issues for now (though it really would be convenient to have any app be able to access a cifs share - maybe if I get ambitious enough I'll figure out how to setup a build environment for the open source kernels and build the modules myself - have to get really bored for that to seem entertaining though .

 

[John Bean]

MX Player is my player of choice. I didn't update my Nexus 7 until I knew it would work on it - and it does!

I had made the mistake of updating my Nexus 4 while nothing I use would work on it. It's fine now though; even Wugs Toolkit can now be used to re-root an updated 4.3 Nexus - which wasn't the case when I updated the N4.