There’s not much information about how to do this and while a number of file managers do give access to Windows/Samba network shares, they only allow you to edit open files leaving the application the responsibility of retrieving the file via smb protocol, which usually does not work very well. One such file manager application that I found able to do this is Astro File Manager although you’ll need to also install the SMB module from Market. Both the file manager and the smb module are free (ad supported) which is great. You wont beable to open a video file with this though because the stock video player does not know how to handle smb.

The other option is to copy them to your device if you have plenty of storage.

However, I discovered this neat little combo that worked for me but it involves rooting your phone and installing cifsmanager and RockPlayer. Essentially, cifsmanager mounts the smb share which other applications like media players can access them as local folders. This of course means you’ll need a fast connection like mounting a share over WiFi. You can technically do it over 3G but it’s going to be slow as hell since it is wont be a real video stream.

The requirements,

1. Root your phone, in order to install the samba kernel module. Most of the custom roms like cyanogen or LeeDroid come with samba module.

2. You’ll probably need to be on Android 2.2 Froyo because I think cifsmanager only works on Froyo and above. You can find cifsmanager on Market or use the following qr code.

3. Install a file manager like Astro from Market (qrcode below) although the file manager does not need samba support for this setup to work.

4. Install a media player like Rock Player from Market which supports a whole load of codecs, I wish someone would port vlc player over soon.

That’s it, if you fire up cifsmanager and mount your samba share, tapping on the mounted share will open your file manager and tapping on the file will open up the video with your choice of media player.