Blu-ray playback pausing and buffering on gigabit network

Is there a trick to eliminating the repetitive pauses and buffering when playing back a Blu-ray on the Odroid C2? About every 1-2 minutes playback pauses and the little throbber thingy comes up in the center of the screen and over a period of several seconds slowly counts up to about 100 and then playback resumes. I’m trying to play an .ISO located on my Windows 10 Pro “server” in the basement. The C2 has a gigabit connection to the switch (confirmed with the status LEDs on the C2) and the server is connected to the switch via 10gig SFP+. I can copy files over SMB to the C2 at 110MB/sec+ and I can copy the Blu-ray .ISO to my desktop at >100MB/sec for the whole thing so I don’t see how network throughput could be responsible. FWIW, I can play it fine in Windows. I’m running CoreELEC 8.95.2 from a 16GB eMMC with no other plug-ins or add-ons and have the cache set to >100MB in my advancedsettings.xml too.

<cache>
<buffermode>1</buffermode>
<memorysize>139460608</memorysize>
<readfactor>20</readfactor>
</cache>

I know you guys like logs, but I’m not sure what to log, and which log(s) you need.

Don’t use SMB share (switch to NFS)

SMB adds protocol overhead and it’s gonna be slower than NFS.

If your video is a big file with high bitrate and you got only 100Mbit Ethernet this can be an issue and switching to NFS is here a serious suggestion.

You have to remember that some chinese boxes (not sure about C2 in your case) have mediocre components and you won’t get speeds like on a good quality hardware. Because of that it’s even more important to switch the protocol and consider buying a device with gigabit lan when it’s time to switch to new hardware.

since network doesn’t seem to be the bottleneck, is this applicable to all .ISO files? have you test .mkv remux files?

Then Raspi is your hardware. :slight_smile:

No problem here playing UHD BD movies through the network with S905X and S912 boxes, although I don’t use ISOs.

I think the problem here is that Kodi doesn’t support caching for .ISOs, so your buffermode, memorysize on your advancedsettings.xml get ignored.
So yes a faster network protocol might help.

The C2 has gigabit Ethernet. I have a full gigabit network. I can copy data to the C2 at >110MBytes/sec via SMB. I was simply remarking that the Rpi3 which only has 100Mbit/sec Ethernet has no issues playing the same .ISO files on the same network.

The inability to stream an .ISO at less than 50Mbit/sec over SMB on a gigabit network is rather pathetic.

Wether or not you have gigabit LAN etc. A suggestion has been made, you could at least try it,

If it doesn’t work, you can say I told you so.

SMB has a lot of overhead.
Try it either with a different network format or from a USB drive and see if the problem persists.
You’re complaining about a problem and then keep complaining after you got several replies from users suggesting a possible solution.

I don’t know how the hell you do that because no memory card can write data at those speeds and USB2 max throughput is less than half of that.

If I test network speed I normally copy to null thus the target write speed is irrelevant.

The overhead if handling the ISO may be a problem. I don’t know if its supported or not but you could unpack the iso with 7zip and maybe see if that works.

SMB 2.x/3.x does not have a lot of a overhead compared to 1.0. My entire network runs with SMB just fine. I’m not going to mess up the rest of my network with NFS because of a single Kodi box. Regardless, SMB doesn’t eat up 95% of the gigabit connection with overhead. I can copy (push) data to the C2 at >110MByte/sec over SMB, so why can’t it stream (pull) data at less than 50Mbit/sec?

It can play the same .ISO file via a USB flash drive just fine. I haven’t tested the .mkv over SMB yet. I ran out of time this morning.

And why do my replies keep getting deleted?

That is incorrect, It’s not network overheads Samba produces it’s CPU overheads, and it slows down everything else and then causes the buffering that you are experiencing, you can share folders on Windows via NFS with not much effort, we even have a how to for it on here.

People have offered you help and advice and your responses have been somewhat arrogant because they are not the answers your looking for and that’s why they was deleted to maintain community standards.

RPi3 != S905 so the comparison is irrelevant, RPi3 is running mainline kernel for a start.

Never had an issue playing ripped BD content over SMB on a C2 yet this is using mkv container not ISO.

Even 4k tech demos that burn thru 2GB in 3 minutes run flawlessly over SMB on C2.

If mkv does the same thing might try disabling large send offload (LSO) on server NIC… usually ended up being cause of my SMB performance issues in the past for me.

1 Like