I’ve used Kodi for a long time so that I can get my high bit rate 4K HDR films off a dedicated file server. It actually works great for really full quality home movies and things when you don’t want compression artifacts. The truth is that most 4K we watch on steaming is low bit rate.
Sometimes you can really see this is dark settings and there is banding of colors. But with a 50GB two hour movie in full HDR and DTS on a LG OLED screen with a 5.4.1 sound system. Well it can really change your view.
But one problem is that when I use Kodi it really doesn’t like user names and passwords. If you allow guest access things are great. Synology and Apple MacOS so Bonjour advertisements aka zeroconf aka a ahi and when you go to Settings > Files you will see those servers in the zeroconf entry.
But I really don’t like leaving open shares even on a home network. Even if it’s set to read only. But if you close up guest access. In a synology this is in the control panel/user. You disable guest access then suddenly all browsing fails to Synology servers over SMB
It turns out that Synology disables SMB v1 because it is insecure and this means you can’t browse shares unless they allow guest (aka no password access). You can actually go to setting/services/SMB client to change the min client to v2
Instead you have to manually add a files entry by going to settings / files / add new source. Then you type in the server IP address. Note that zeroconf doesn’t work here. If you try to browse you won’t see servers so you need the IP address. If you have a Ubiquiti router then you are in luck. It adds to the DNS automatically the host name in the domain .localdomain. This isn’t the same as the special Bonjour domain in .local.
So you enter the server name and a share there and this is how passwords get matched. Note that apparently the password is saved in clear text as a password.xml in Kodi so make sure the user is read only!
