How to connect to Filezilla FTP over TLS server to stream music?

1st Official Post

    Hi Good People,
    I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!

    I am trying since few weeks to find a way to stream my media files which are sitting in an external hard drive to a LE/CE box.
    I read somewhere that the best way is to setup an openvpn tunnel between the two machines. I spent a couple of weeks trying but couldn't get to the end of the solutions.
    There is very little clear tutorials on how to set OpenVPN out there for unexperienced people like me.

    DLNA solution seem to be limited to machines sitting on the same LAN.
    Though having trien JRiver Media Centre, it was successful for me to access my media with Gizmo on my Android phone. But trying to connect LE/CE to JRiver failed.

    I am now trying the last solution of FTP over TLS server before I give up. I installed Filezilla FTP server and it works fine using Filezilla client.
    But, I am getting very frustrated as I am unable to add the Filezilla FTP over TLS server on my LE/CE sources.
    Can anybody confirm whether the FTPS protocol is actually the FTP over TLS or is it another FTP something different protocol?
    Is there a way to connect to my Filezilla FTP over TLS server from LE/CE or am I wasting my time?

    Finally is there any solution out there which designed to allow LE/CE to stream media from a source over the internet and if yes, it there and step by step tutorial available?

    Thanks huys for your help. Wishing you all a Joyful 2019.

    Naass

    Edited once, last by Naass: mistakes (December 27, 2018 at 4:39 PM).

    • Official Post

    Connect the external hard drive to the LE/HTPC box and play movies via the USB connection. Or if it's a NAS device in the network; connect to the SMB file share on the NAS. I can't think of any reason why you'd need to use FTP (or use a VPN) to access an external hard drive. NB: Kodi 18 does support SFTP but only if you install the SFTP support addon from our addon repo.

    Dear Chewitt,
    I apologise for not making it clear that I am trying to access my media files over the internet.
    I have a huge music library that I would like to share it with a member of the family whom I provided with a LibreElec box.
    I think I am not the nonly one around who's looking for a solution to this situation.
    In any case, I managed to install a Filezilla Server running FTP over TLS. I can access this server using a Filezilla client connect in passive mode to the shared media folders on my harddrive which is connected to the windows 10 PC running the server.
    My problem is that I am not finding the right syntax filling the "Add network location" when adding the FTPS source in LE!
    I tried both FTP and FTPS tabs with paths which look like when using FTPS tab:
    ftps://user:password@http://myddns.ddns.net//Video/|Auth=SSL-TLS
    ftps://user:password@http://myddns.ddns.net/Video/|Auth=SSL-TLS

    ftps://user:password@http://myddns.ddns.net//Video/?pasv|Auth=SSL-TLS

    ftps://user:password@http://myddns.ddns.net//Video/?passive|Auth=SSL-TLS

    ftps://user:password@http://myddns.ddns.net//Video/|Auth=SSL-TLS


    These returned this message on the server:
    Connected on port 990, sending welcome message
    disconnected.

    I tried similar paths using the FTP which resulted with this error from the server:

    Connected on port 21, sending welcome message

    USER User

    530 This server does not allow plain FTP. You have to use FTP over TLS

    disconnected.

    I would appreciate your patience and help.

    Happy New Year.


    Quote from TheWojtek

    1st: read FTPS (FTP over SSL) vs. SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol)

    2nd: FTP (and derivatives) kinda suck for streaming. Ditch the Filezilla and stream using http(s) on a port of choice.

    Thanks TheWojtek for your input.

    On 1, I read few comparisons on the FTPS vs SFTP. In the beginning, I thought they're the same and I tried to setup a SFTP server. But then I couldn't connect Kodi to the server. There is no SFTP protocol tab proposed when adding a new network source.

    On 2, is http(s) you're proposing the one matches the WebDAV protocol. If it is, I couldn't find out there how to install the server on a window 10 pc.

    I attempted to install the WebDAV server on and Odroid xu4, but I am struggling with Ubuntu 18.04. I paused my attempt when I had difficulty to mount my 8tb external HDD NTFS partition. And when the problem was solved, I was surprised to see that Ubuntu doesn't see the media files/folders!

    Do you know if there is out there a step by step setup of http(s) on Windows 10?

    Thanks for your help.

    At the end it is very easy to make it work :P

    As source use ftps://user:[email protected]:990/|auth=SSL/TLS

    When creating certificate in FileZilla FTP server you ABSOLUTELY need to enter Common name (Server address) as shown on picture

    Then you need to convert certificate from crt to pem format using openssl tool on LibreELEC box or somewhere else with command

    Code
    openssl x509 -in certificate.crt -out certificate.pem

    and copied to users' cacert.pem

    Code
    cat certificate.pem >/storage/.config/cacert.pem

    After that run openssl-config and restart kodi (systemctl restart kodi) or just reboot. And it should work like for me here.

    Another option for certificates is to create them with openssl (as you probably know).

    Update: I also removed few posts not adding any value to this discussion.

    What I forgot to mention that when using |auth=SSL/TLS&verifypeer=false you don't need to do anything with cacert.pem on LE box. But obviously this is not good from security perspective.

    If it doesn't work enable debug log for curl in kodi and you will see some errors. I think major error messages are also shown in normal kodi log.

    Good morning Vpeter,
    Saw you deleted few conversations on here!
    I have the feeling that you were teasing me with the questions about how to setup an FTP server because frankly I see you are a top expert in FTPS communications! :)
    I have to thank you for this last message as it did the very job I was trying to do.
    Very happ with the result.
    Thank you for your precious support.
    Have a great day.

    No, no, I was not teasing you. It's just I never really used sftp or ftps. But I would say I'm very good with problem solving :)

    Anyway, good that it is working for you too. Next time you could also look for webdav or sshfs.

    Yes, I will have a deeper look on WebDAV as my few tests of streaming media weren't very convincing!
    Music streaming is ok, but video insn't at all.
    I have a fairly good internet speed (80mb download and around 16mb up).
    Videos stop for almost a minute before they restart for another minute and so on!
    I need to check out WebDAV to see whether it is better than FTPS.

    Quote from Naass

    Do you know if there is out there a step by step setup of http(s) on Windows 10?

    Sure. I would just install MAMP (Downloads - MAMP & MAMP PRO) and go from there. It's very easy to set up (I assume it has the same UI as the Mac OS version of MAMP).
    However I have no idea how would KODI/LE react for a source that has a self-signed certificate. Sadly you can not have a reliable SSL certificate for a dyndns server, or at least I was not able to read enough to accomplish just that.

    It seems that without a properly working rev-DNS (and it does not work as intended in case of dyndns'ed computers) it's not possible to have a certificate (I tried Let's Encrypt) issued. I'd have to dig deeper into it since I believe it should but am just too dumb for that.

    • Official Post

    Lets Encrypt has no requirement for working reverse DNS records. It only requires the A/CNAME record that's used in the cert to be correct, and the webserver to allow access to a temporary folder that's accessed to validate the host during the cert registration/renewal process.