Will there ever be the option to mount via NFS or CIFS? This would be a phenomenal idea and a simple way to get the roms to the nexus player, or other android devices, without the need to lug around a usb stick.
If you can and are willing to root your device (or already have), this is already possible using busybox’s mount. Note this also requires support in your device’s kernel for said file systems, which is likely for NFS but pretty touchy (read, unlikely) for CIFS. I’m at work right now but later on I could share the script I use to mount an NFS share from my NAS on my nVidia Shield TV.
I wasn’t that happy with rooting my nexus player, previously… But may consider again.
I read a feature request articles, that the team wasn’t interested in adding samba, after I posted this.
Nfs is fairly simple and I would hope to see it in the future.
It would be nice if android would natively incorporate this, now that they are looking to take on the set top market.
Yeah, built-in NFS or Samba support, similar to how Kodi works (that latter of which, as you said, seems unlikely since the RA team apparently isn’t interested) would be really nice for those of us with some form of NAS and devices without a lot of storage on them. It’s also a convenient way of having all game saves, etc., automatically shared throughout the house since you just configure all the RA instances to use the same directory for that as well (something I already do with my system-level mounted NFS shares).
Retroarch is not a kitchensink app. It’s not an OS either.
We’re instead looking into implementing Google storage access framework.
While i understand that the desire is to not make this a kitchen sink app, i feel this would be a remarkable feature for those with tv’s and etc that just do not feel comfortable with rooting.
I would even be willing to pay a bounty on this, if one was set. 
I understand why people always think it’s always about money, that’ what the society teaches us. But here at least, it’s not.
Anyway, I guess if someone did it it would be merged but I don’t think anyone is willing to implement this into the frontend itself.
Completely understandable. My hopes would be that if there were ever such a bounty, that the treasure would go for beers and pizza, for the fine work your team does.
I used cifs and retroarch on my nexus player withthis rom: http://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-player/orig-development/rom-t2982801 , to get kernel support for cifs and then exactly the same way as i described doing on my Shield TV ( upgraded from Nexus Player to Shield TV): https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/856208/-guide-how-to-mount-a-network-share-into-the-filesystem-root-/#4605453
I tried following your guide, but Cifsmanager says it ‘cannot find the device’ yet ES File Explorer can browse the Windows share just fine. Any ideas?
Not all of us intend to rom our TV’s. Seems like a rather silly idea.
got kernel support for cifs?, only thing i can think of if you added all the parameters into Cifs manager and didnt have any blank spaces and such.
example: share path: 192.168.100.100/ROMs mount path: /data/media/0/cifs
Dont realy understand why you want retroarch to mount CIFS unless you want it on any compatible devices, that same guide can be used for your phone or tablet, i did it on my Note 4 with a custom kernel.
[QUOTE=DarkShadowSwE;27942]got kernel support for cifs?, only thing i can think of if you added all the parameters into Cifs manager and didnt have any blank spaces and such.
example: share path: 192.168.100.100/ROMs mount path: /data/media/0/cifs
Dont realy understand why you want retroarch to mount CIFS unless you want it on any compatible devices, that same guide can be used for your phone or tablet, i did it on my Note 4 with a custom kernel.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I have no quotes or spaces. Even the custom kernel I have says it has CIFS support, but I haven’t been able to get it to work.
[QUOTE=Radius;26536]Retroarch is not a kitchensink app. It’s not an OS either.
We’re instead looking into implementing Google storage access framework.[/QUOTE] That’s sounds fantastic! Won’t lose any more saves.
and you mount into “/data/media/0/cifs” (thats equivalent to “/sdcard/cifs”), what error message do you get?
I hate to rehard old news, but has this ever been considered again yet?
It sure would be nice to have SOMETHING until Android comes out with a native way to do this.
[QUOTE=Radius;26601]I understand why people always think it’s always about money, that’ what the society teaches us. But here at least, it’s not.
What I’m saying here is completely off topic: I’m glad to see that there are people like you.
FWIW, I stream retro arch to my Android devices with Nvidia in-home streaming. Not perfect, which is how I ended up here, but it works for me.
Ya know, the more i think back to it. Having an option to share save games via google drive or dropbox wouldn’t be a half bad idea either. I think there is an app called FolderSync that would help do that as things are today.
So foldersync accomplishes what i am set out to do. I am able to have it sync with a local smb share and things work as expected. The only downside to this solution is that you are going to keep a copy locally, as this is pretty much the equivalent of an rsync.
For me, that is no problem as I have a 500gb Shield. For others, you will have to slim down the files you wish to choose to fit your needs.
Hope this helps someone else.