It stands to reason though to expect a Windows filesystem to be served best with a Windows filesharing protocol and a Linux filesystem to be served best with a Linux protocol. File ownership and permissions won’t necessarily translate but that won’t matter for media files. Note that any filesystem format can be used with any protocol, for example you can share NTFS files using NFS or Linux (ext4) files using SMB. Some media servers may offer only UPnP for sharing. We do not generally recommend the use of UPnP for security and performance reasons, but if you already have a UPnP/DLNA server it should be the easiest of all to set up. See here: Add NFS server capabilities to Windows (free). If you really don’t want to use SMB on Windows, there are NFS servers available. If your NAS or other device where you store media supports only SMB version 1 you may have to adjust the SMB version in Kodi (see below). The Samba client is included in OSMC, the Samba server is optional. They can’t join a ‘HomeGroup’ but according to this: they can access shares created using a homegroup. Linux machines connect to SMB shares using a package called Samba. SMB is built in to every version of Windows. If you keep your media on a Windows machine then it makes sense to use the SMB protocol, otherwise known as CIFS, especially if you have other Windows machines on the network. Windows (but not ‘Home’ versions) also has an NFS client so you can still access those NAS files from Windows. NFS is the built-in network filesharing system in Linux.

If you have a NAS that offers the NFS filesharing protocol, choose that for best performance with OSMC devices.

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