Android SMB/CIFS clients

[_Rick_]

I'm used to the awesome CIFS integration of my Archos 5, which has good performance, nice integration with the built in video app, and is generally one of the best features, considering it's over 3 year old hardware.
On my Note 2, it's nigh-impossible to get any file streamed over the network (despite the), and I've tried two or three different explorer style applications as well as DICEplayer, which supports playback from smb-hosted files. They all seem to lag horribly, both in the Samsung standard video player and in VLC, or natively.
Also, copyying is really ridiculously slow as well. 500 MB takes 20 minutes or more (though transmission speed at times varies)

Again, via the same WiFi (and at 11 Mbit instead of 54 Mbit) there's absolutely no problem for the Archos 5. Not that filesize should be an issue anyway, bitrate is usually quite low for most of these files.

I'm short of buying Archos' player from the play store, to see if that has the same performance as the old one. Alternatively I am considering rooting the phone, and installing a custom ROM with NFS support compiled into the kernel, or some samba variant.

Currently, it's a bit of a let down, having to connect via USB to get files onto the device, to watch them.

Alternatively : could it be that using 54Mbit instead of 11 (both on 802.11g) creates more transmission errors, and so the Wi-Fi is slower, because it's trying to use more bandwidth?

A colleague has proposed me to set up DLNA, but coming from a system that has been perfectly fine on my older hardware (and still is), I'm a bit hesitant to set up something else entirely.

 

[vshah]

i use es file explorer, works fine for smb and ftp access to my server
once i click on them, i play them with mx player pro or diceplayer


could it just be that the note 2's wifi performance sucks?

 

[_Rick_]

Possible.
ES File Explorer is one of the things I tried.
On the other hand, youtube videos seem to work...reasonably well.
Can't get them to work in HD either though, but then my internet connection has been downgraded to 2Mbit or so, which is quite limiting.


Anyone else have similar issue on their note 2?

And what could I use to benchmark WiFi properly?

The Speedtest net benchmark at work is indicative of massive packet loss, despite supposedly good signal strength. But could also be limited by the outgoing line. A local test would be welcome.

 

[Riceninja]

BS player works on note 2 with SMB

 

[ChronoReverse]

Use ES Explorer to run a FTP server on your phone. Then transfer a large file (500MB at least) to your phone and see how fast it goes.

 

[wirednuts]

es file explorer.

i also use it to connect to my ftp drive on my router. love it.

 

[lopri]

X-plore is a good alternative to ES explorer. Smaller footprint and fewer permissions. ES is fine, too.

Or AndSMB.