Playing files in Kodi from Windows symbolic links via SMB

  • I'm trying to get my Raspberry Pi 4b working with Kodi. I have the latest version of LibreElec and Kodi installed, and all seems to be ok.

    The problem I am having is that I have 6 different Windows computers with media files on them (a mixture of Windows 7 and Windows 10). I have my main media server (Windows 7) with a folder filled with symbolic links pointing to all of the media files on all of the other machines scattered around my network (this was done for Serviio).

    I'm trying to get Kodi configured so that I can just create a single Video Source and access all of my media through that. I have been trying to get SMB to follow the symbolic links, but I just keep getting a message in the log file saying

    SMBFile->Open: Unable to open file : 'smb://USERNAME:PASSWORD@media_server/Video%20Files/file1.mkv'

    unix_err:'d' error : 'Permission denied'

    I have read all of the stuff about the changes to SMB etc, but that doesn't seem to be related.

    I have done a test and Kodi quite happily will play a video file using SMB when it isn't a symbolic link, but directly from any of the PCs on my network, so I believe I have all of the user permissions set up correctly.

    I have tried setting up 2 different FTP servers on my media server, but I get errors due to the symbolic link file being 0 bytes and then when the FTP server sends more than 0 bytes, Kodi sees that there is a difference between the files size it is told to expect (0 bytes) and the file size it is actually receiving (many GB).

    I will add that with this same configuration it works fine with Kodi on Windows. The problem seems to be in the way LibreElec handles SMB and Windows symbolic links.

    The symbolic links are all absolute UNC paths (rather than relative paths) - otherwise they wouldn't work with Kodi on Windows.

    Any help would be greatly appreciated