I have an old ubuntu laptop hooked up to between my wireless network and a wired media player box.

I had previously shared my wireless network connection so the media player had internet access (ie. via nat) because it was a different subnet it could not access the file shares on the wireless network. To get around this I mounted the drives from the wireless network on the laptop and re-shared them with samba.

This worked ok but had some drawbacks, it seemed slow and if network computers were turned off when the laptop rebooted I had to manually mount the shares.

I've just re-installed with the latest ubuntu and was wondering if there is a better way to do this.

Is there some way to bridge so the media player appears to be on the wireless network? Would this give better performance? Any other options? I'm also thinking there might be some samba options that could buffer files?