Hi,
why the internal player does not support usage of user/pass protected shares?
I don't think it is difficult at all. Some hidden performance problem?
KODI support it, but has the restrictions of Blu-ray 3D playing and HD audio (DTS-HD/Dolby TrueHD) bitstream.
Can you ask HiMedia why not make it as an option in their player?
One of my storages is windows 7 64 - and I can create additional sharing w/o authentication,
but the other is embedded NAS Netgear MS2000 - it doesn't support mixed sharing and I don't want to expose my storage
to other computers in the network

Regards,
Hristo