IPad Air and streaming video from local network

Question

Hello everyone! I'm a new member and a new Apple device user.
I come from Android and honestly my experience wasn't negative or bad, but I was kind of sick of the look and feel of Android. I decided therefore to try something new, fresh and so well spoken of: the iPad Air (16 GB WiFi only model).
However this is not a review or anything so let me skip directly to the issue: streaming video on a local network.
In Android this is a basic thing, you can do it in several ways with several app over different networks (SMB, FTP, SFTP, DLNA (UPNP), etc.). The first thing I did is to try the FTP streaming with VLC: suffice to say that after a second it closes itself (the video, not the app), and this happens with all the videos. I've been searching for a working alternative but so far I found only paid apps. I cannot pay for something I'm not completely sure it is going to work. Free alternatives of paid apps are extremely limited (i.e: no audio or even no network streaming).
What I need to know is this: is it possible on the iPad Air to stream video from a local network (preferably SMB and FTP) without any sort of conversion or transcoding? What I would like to stream are video in 720p or 1080p, sometimes even 15 Gb Blurays. Files are either in mkv or mp4 format. I also always use subtitles.
Please let me know if this is possible.

Answer 1

you need to get apps from app store which does upnp and the likes there are plenty
you can do anything the app support but you can't use the normal build in movie player to play from smb or ftp
but search app store there are likely support for at least smb not sure about ftp it's a pretty old std which would result in transferring the whole file rather then streaming
start by looking for vlc in app store and then go on to upnp and smb use search