Launch Playback of Multimedia Files on a SAMBA Share from Nautilus

I hit this problem on a new Debian installation: if I use Nautilus to navigate to a SAMBA share (on a Windows or Linux box) I can launch playback of multimedia files by double clicking them. So far so good. This brings up Totem (the default Gnome multimedia player), which is fine, but I'd rather use VLC (from the Debian Multimedia repository).

It's easy enough to convince Nautilus to launch VLC, but VLC fails to find the multimedia files. This only happens if the SAMBA share is mounted by Nautilus. If I mount the SAMBA share manually from the command line, VLC finds the files just fine.

The problem is that Nautilus points VLC to a non-existent path that lives on the Gnome virtual file system (GVFS).

The fix is to install the GVFS FUSE daemon, which, for some reason, is not installed by default:

aptitude install gvfs-fuse

add your user account to the fuse group, and re-login.