Hi Howard. I don’t commonly use vlc (or play media via remote samba servers), but in an effort to assist I just attempted to play a movie file from a file stored on a Windiws 10 host, and got an error “VLC is unable to open the MRL ‘smb://dean@deanm.local/Downloads/sample.mp4’. Check the log for details.”
After configuring vlc with the appropriate credentials for this share
VLC > Preferences > Show settings (All) > Input / Codecs > Access Modules > SMB (appropriate credentials added here), I could now access the media available on that share. FWIW, if guest access is enabled I found just adding any username and password (eg a, c) was sufficient to gain the necessary access.
More info here:
https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/vlc-remote-files.html
Hope this helps.