Consumer Reports magazine in the US will rate televisions for you, as to how well or how poorly they treat your data privacy when internet connected. Most, as you might expect, don’t do very well on this score. The same might apply to a person’s AVR or various apps running on a media computer. Some of us like to use VPNs for these reasons.
My use case for KODI for some years now has involved running it and my VPN simultaneously on an Nvidia Shield, and accessing files on a USB HD attached to my router via SMB connections. This worked fine for many months until I suddenly found my KODI SMB links no longer worked, and I couldn’t identify what changed or how to restore them. I spent hours trouble shooting until I finally discovered to my surprise that the SMB links to the remote share worked only if the VPN was disconnected. The VPN people denied that they changed anything to cause such a thing, and blamed KODI.
I switched to another VPN, and once again, the SMB connections worked fine. This was the case until KODI 21 Beta 1 I think, when once again the SMB connections were useless. I’ve had to relocate my HD to a local USB connection on the Shield to get functionality back, although this is not the way I’d like to set up my LAN storage.
Is this a bug or a feature? Any comments as to why this should happen and how “should” KODI behave are welcome.