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Please help me stop my baby from crying because kodi keeps buffering

The toddler loves having Kodi full of all their faves but I haven’t been able to iron out all the buffering I’m getting streaming from my mini-pc NFS mounted shares to the pi4 libreelec hooked up via Ethernet in the living room. Everything is wired, so I wouldn’t think that would be an issue but here I am about to put down a couple hundred dollars for a Synology router that looks like the monolith from 2001. Is this going to do the trick, you think? Is there another router recommended to keep a distributed little homelab (any 10tb spread between various usb hdd, raspberry pi’s and mini PCs all hosting a variety of containers and services) running smoothly? Budget I’m hoping to keep under 300 and lower the better but happy toddler and buttery smooth streaming over lan is the priority.

Scrath ,

I’m not sure about how this works in kodi but in jellyfin the client might request a different resolution which causes the server to try and reencode the provided file on the fly. In my case my server isn’t fast enough for this which leads to constant buffering

GravitySpoiled ,

Likely, This is it. It transcodes and hence it has to buffer because the server isn’t strong enough. Best is to use a gpu like intel a380 as described in jellyfin’s doc.

Gutless2615 OP ,

No no transcoding happening on kodi, it’s just playing it straight over the lan. That said I do have jellyfin set up on a machine that can handle transcoding for a number of clients. I gave considered switching to Kodi +Jellyfin and seeing if that’s better.

breadsmasher ,
@breadsmasher@lemmy.world avatar

I havent used kodi in a long time, since swapping to jellyfin. I personally found kodi would always buffer sometimes, far more than it should ever need to. With jellyfin, same server, no buffer

tofubl ,

Installing the Jellyfin add on into kodi takes a few minutes. Nothing much to consider, just try it and see if that changes anything.

I have a similar setup (rpi with OSMC, media hosted on file server) and prefer using Jellyfin as the source for all clients, as it keeps track of watched status across everything. It’s not perfect, but better than without Jellyfin.

cmnybo ,

Kodi doesn’t do any transcoding. It just mounts the NFS share and plays the file.

Dremor , (edited )
@Dremor@lemmy.world avatar

To me it looks like you don’t have enough power, either on the Pi4 side to decode, or the mini-pc to encode.

TheBigBrother ,

ADHD diagnostic in 3, 2, 1…

Gutless2615 OP ,

Appreciate the solicited technical advice, less so the unsolicited parenting advice, thanks! You’ll be shocked to hear that hyperbole exists, I’m sure. I’m just trying to watch the Aristocats with the kiddo without them wondering why the screen stops mid song, stranger.

RegalPotoo , (edited )
@RegalPotoo@lemmy.world avatar

There are very few things more obnoxious than an asshole with unsolicited parenting advice

Gutless2615 OP ,

Right? The absolute gall.

Dremor ,
@Dremor@lemmy.world avatar

Removed the parental advice part. I didn’t want to be an asshole, believe me.

Gutless2615 OP ,

❤️

Faceman2K23 ,
@Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

can you run something like iperf3 or openspeedtest between the server and client to prove its a network throughput issue?

do you have a network switch you can add to avoid switching through your router (if it is indeed bad?)

Have you ensured you arent unknowingly using wifi at either end?

vext01 ,
@vext01@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I gave up on kodi. Jellyfin works better, presumably because it transcodes better.

RootBeerGuy ,
@RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Haven’t used Kodi but am running Jellyfin via the official docker image on a Raspberry Pi 4. Even there transcoding works reasonably well for one user at a time, admittedly didn’t try with several users at the same time so far.

Just mentioning the docker image because I used to install it without docker directly via the repository and I never got transcoding to work on the same hardware.

Saff ,

Do you experience buffering if you watch on a pc / laptop on VLC via network? This will tell you if it’s network speed related or hardware power related. I would assume the pi is not quite powerful enough. I am using a device called a Vero 4k+ and it works wonderfully. But my network setup sounds similar to yours, I just have an smb share on my pc and I added it as a source in kodi.

just_another_person ,

Just get a tablet and run VLC. Hardware transcoding is a privilege, not a necessity.

Gutless2615 OP ,

It’s not doing hardware transcoding afaik. This is the equivalent of running VLC, right? It’s kodi we’re not talking about jellyfin transcoding.

just_another_person ,

VLC will just do network transfer and decode on the software side without issue.

Jellyfin will default to hardware decoding.

Gutless2615 OP ,

Right. The architecture we’re talking about right now is a NFS hosted share going to a Kodi instance, not a jellyfin instance sharing to Kodi. Kodi does not transcode. It handles things similarly to VLC afaik.

NeoNachtwaechter ,

In my living room, buffering happens when the connection is only WiFi, but you are on ethernet already (which solves that for me).

pi4 libreelec

Have you considered getting one of these small Chinese “Android TV” boxes?

astrsk ,
@astrsk@kbin.run avatar

Please do not buy cheap no brand android tv boxes unless you know how to verify they are not running malware out of the box. This is a known problem and shouldn’t be recommended.

NeoNachtwaechter ,

unless you know how to verify they are not running malware out of the box.

So why don’t you tell us how to verify that?

astrsk ,
@astrsk@kbin.run avatar

First result searching “how to check if android tv is infected”: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/thousands-of-android-tv-boxes-infected-with-dangerous-malware-linked-to-fraud

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