Philips Pico Pix Max:
I managed to make the use of network stuff more comfortable, but still I find some limits.
Some apps, like "Night Video Player" are unable to access even local storage, so the only way to play something with them is to browse to the file you want with the File Manager, and launch it selecting the player you want to use.
The default File Manager anyway is able to only access physical supports, so local or USB...
There is a workaround anyway, using another APP to manage files, "Total Commander" !!
With it you can add the SMB plugin and create a network connection to your shared folders, so that
you can launch directly your network files with the player you want, even if that player doesn't have network functionalities !!
- Night Video Player: can play videos from shared folders only if it's launched from Total Commander with the network plugin.
- VLC: can access by itself almost anything in the network, it is also becoming incredibly better in general at every new version.
- KODI: it has SMB capabilities, but seems unable to even see the network... it gives only some numeric errors and I'll have to do some research.
Using Chromecast works pretty well, but it is visible that the quality of the video and audio are not the original one (if you really look at the details), and also it has a really small cache, so if for some reason the connection is not perfect, some lags could happen.
Playing videos from SMB shares instead seems absolutely lag free, and the quality is still the one of the original file.