When given smb:// path without a password in it, VLC gives up instead of asking the user or looking in the system password store

VLC built from git master on Kubuntu 17.04

If you pass VLC a Samba URL that has a password in it (e.g. smb://user@password:share/path/to/file.avi), VLC successfully opens the file.

But if you omit the password from the URL, VLC fails immediately with the following error:

It neither prompts you for the share's password nor attempts to look it up in the system's password store. It just fails.

Prompting would be better than nothing, but even better would be first looking in the system's password store to see if there's already a stored password for the share (there probably is, since the share has been accessed). There are a variety of cross-platform libraries that would simplify this task, such as libqtkeychain.

This is a problem for KDE systems where Samba paths are not mounted locally using FUSE like GNOME's GFVS does, nor is it considered acceptable to pass passwords around in plaintext in Samba URLs.