Just ran into this the other night myself. Turns out I didn't have the path the correct way, cause samba is picky. My original config was set up with the path = /home/user/Public but I had to change it to path = /home/user/Public/ You're path in your reply looks like it's missing that / at the end. After you update, don't forget to restart the service.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Well that made it show up thankfully, but it's asking me to log in. Any idea how to handle that? I don't want it to ask at all so family members have ready access.
i know i will be like a meme of "answers completely different question", but jellyfin does this natively, so if you strictly need this for movies/media, maybe try it out?
Yeah use some sort of selfhosted mediashare, imo runtipis the easiest way to get it up and running, becuase im lazy and it has a one click installer, auto uodates, backups, etc.
All I'm trying to do is play videos on Xbox/Roku, so whatever makes that happen easily is fine with me for now. I would like to build a stand alone media pc/NAS later but for now just want to keep hosting it on my pc.
ah, dunno how good their app is on xbox, it was abandoned for a long time :( roku should work fine though
It works (VLC on Xbox), but it's definitely not that great.
I meant jellyfin on xbox, they seem to have some version of it. If it works, then you are kinda golden, install jellyfin on pc, add a folder with movies as a library, and install clients where you need them, and it would work (if your ip on home network is fixed that is, would need some router fixing if not, cause it talks by ip:port to server (your pc)). Think jellyfin fixed sketchiest issues with transcoding, so it kinda not that involved on server side
This is actually what I did. I never could get Samba working, so I setup Jellyfin and it's been a breeze ever since. What an amazing piece of software! I just wanted to access my files, but having them categorized with images, cast and crew, ratings, and even recommended is just fantastic. The Xbox app works fine but it's basically just a web wrapper, and the cursor never goes away which is mildly annoying, but it's still a way better experience than the VLC Xbox app.
Thanks for the help!
yay, congrats 
It would be helpful to know what you’ve already tried and what went wrong. The more info the better.
Well I tried the UI approach of right clicking the folder and going to share options, which is when I was prompted to install Samba, but there is warning that states "The permission for prevent othersl users from accessing this share". I did some digging on that error, and everything I came across basically said that wouldn't work. My next attempt was modifying the Samba config file, I added
[FolderName]
path = (file directory path I see in properties, /media/username/lettersandnumbersfordrive?/FolderName)
browseable = yes
read only = yes
guest ok = yes
create mask =0775
As instructed by a tutorial I found. When running testpram I don't get any errors, but I'm not seeing the folder in VLC like I do when sharing from Win10. That's as far as I have gotten. If there's anything else that I can provide please let me know, and on that note, the drive I'm sharing from is NTFS if that has any impact.
Thanks again!
In your Samba config file, when you’re specifying a share path, after FolderName, you need to put a final /
So I added the forward slash and now the folder shows up, but it's asking me for login credentials now. I thought "guests ok = yes" would handle that but apparently not. Any suggestions?
Use whatever username and password you have set up for an account on the host computer.
Similar issue: https://serverfault.com/questions/575394/samba-public-share-windows-keeps-asking-for-password#715372
Adding
[global]
map to guest = bad user
to smb.conf and restart the service.
If that doesn't work there are a few other suggestions in the thread.
If it is for Media Files only UPnP could be an alternative to smb.
Can you share your smb.conf?
Well did the samba user account (used to connect to the samba share) have access to the files?
You might have answered the OP question, and a long standing mine as well. Gonna check this up on my setup