amoraK/VLC/Windows Shares woes

[the ev]

I recently switched to Kubuntu from WinXP MCE - and I absolutely love Dapper. As I have a rather large collection of music and videos, I keep them stored on a seperate server, running Windows 2003 Server Standard.

On my Windows system, I could just tell WinAmp or VLC to play the music/video file from its remote location, and it would stream effortlessly across the network without any file copying. I can't seem to do that with amoraK or VLC for Linux.

In the case of amoraK, the file seems to be added to my playlist/library, but when I try to play it, the text just turns grey and nothing happens. I have to copy the file to my desktop, then it plays fine. In the case of VLC, I can't add remote items to my playlist at all (by drag and drop), and if I do it through the menus, a copy dialog comes up and it copies the file to a temp folder on my local HD, then it plays it fine.

Obviously, I don't want to copy every song/movie I want to enjoy to my local HD, so how can I access these files through these programs over the network? If this can't be done with Windows 2003 Server, could it be done if I switched to Ubuntu 6 Server?

[the ev]

Re: amoraK/VLC/Windows Shares woes

So I've done more tinkering with it and I managed to get both VLC and amoraK to work when I installed Smb4K and used it to mount the shares.

VLC works just fine, but amoraK still seems to have some issues. For one, the ID3 tagging is all out of this world: for a file that is clearly correctly labelled (manually, by me), it will mix and match across the fields to yeild totally incorrect labels. The song title is generally always correct, but the album and artist are all out of whack. It labelled Beck's "Girl" off of the ablum Guero as being performed by Ben Kweller off the Starcraft Soundtrack!!!!

Any thoughts?