If you are new the G-Box era and have a bunch of files on your Windows computer, you can share that content with all the G-Boxes in your house right away! The process of sharing files form your computer to your TV is simple and requires no other applications other than your G-Box, home computer, and your TV!
1. Organize Your Content
The first step is to organize all of your content in your media folder on your computer into one folder. This folder can contain subdirectories if you would like to further organize it. An example directory might be:
As you can see, I have Shared Videos and a bunch of directories underneath. This is our testing folder where we test multiple codecs for our Media Center or XBMC.
2. Share Your Content
Next, right click on the root folder (In my case I would choose “Shared Videos”). Choose Properties > Sharing:
Press the “Share” button and type who you want to share the drive with. In the example picture below, I chose “Everyone”.
Press “Share” and it will generate the path that you can type into the Media Center (XBMC on the MX2) for Videos, Pictures, or Music! The path must be typed in a certain way into Media Center and XBMC. In my case, the generated path was “\\SR388\Users\Anthony\Videos”. I would type “smb://SR388/Users/Anthony/Videos” in my Media Center and XBMC, without quotes.
3. Add Your Content
Now that we have our folder shared, we just need to add our folder into Media Center or XBMC. From the main menu, choose the item you want to add. We’ll use Videos in our example. Afterward, choose “Files” and then “Add Videos…”. Replace Videos with whatever you selected, whether it’s pictures or music.
Finally, you can either Browse for the path or type it manually. I prefer to type the path manually, but you can browse for it too. In the box that says “<none>”, type in your path. (In my case “smb://SR388/Users/Anthony/Videos” without quotes). If you hit Browse, make sure to select “Windows Network (SMB)”, followed by your workgroup. (Your workgroup is commonly titled “WORKGROUP”. If you don’t know your workgroup, contact your system administrator if applicable). Then browse to your computer name, and select the shared folder.
That’s it! You have now setup your SMB streaming share and it will contain the same content as your folder on your computer. This will always stay up to date, so feel free to continue adding to your folder!
Troubleshooting
So you’ve got your folder shared, but it’s just not working right! Try these easy steps to see if this fixes your issues:
- Make sure both devices are on the same network. This will not work otherwise.
- Double check that the path you are typing matches the path that was given to you by Windows.
- If you are having problems with authentication, make sure that the shared folder is shared with Everyone.
