I’m pulling my hair out and really hoping for some help. I have two Odroid N2’s running 9.2.4.2 on a Gigabit network – using NFS for my Unraid Shares. I have tested my network throughput, extensively, and during multiple 1-5 minute iperf3 tests, I haven’t seen a read speed slower than 99 MBytes/sec. However, whenever I try to watch high bitrate, I get buffering like crazy, both with and without Cache adjustments via advancedsettings.xml. I even seen buffering on lower bitrate content, from time to time. To put it mildly, I’ve tested every single recommended cache setting I’ve seen referenced on this forum and most other Kodi related forums.
I’ve tried countless fresh installs of 9.2.4.2, with no real stable progress. Every so often I’ll get perfectly clean playback of the 400Mbps Jellyfish video or Good Fellas 4k Remux – proving super high bitrate isn’t the issue, in general – but then it stutters again and that and much lower bitrate content. I’ve tested everything from Jellyfish to 4K remuxes (Lucy, GoodFellas), and I’m just banging my head against a wall.
I’m also getting all kinds of crazy artifacts on playback
Uploading logs directly from CoreELEC resulted in an error.
Full logs from Kodi are uploaded to DropBox:
Not sure if it’s appropriate, but I’m happy to put a bounty on this. I’m losing my mind
Well, OK, the Jellyfish vids seem to be a trainwreck. They are hit or miss on both, it seems.
I just made a 3 minute Lucy clip – using ffmpeg copy/copy of the scene that buffers consistently – to test locally on the device and it doesn’t buffer when local on the device SD Card.
As an example and why I’m pulling my hair out, when playing the same content from my NAS it will buffer like crazy the first time I watch it and the cache will be hovering around 0-5% full. Then, I’ll stop it and start it again, and the buffer will fill normally and playback will be smooth. It’s almost like the cache isn’t working as it should – both with and without advancedsettings.xml in use.
Provide a short clip that you yourself have issues with so that others can test on their N2’s and make sure that the exported clip properties do match those of the main video.
As far as samples such as the 400Mbps Jellyfish video go, 400Mbps is an extraordinarily high bitrate and IMO not representative of the kind of bitrate that people would generally use and so, should be treated as nothing more than a benchmark of what the limits are rather than an expectation for them to play.
If You have a stable Gb network, there is no need to configure caching in advancedsettings.xml
I did some test in the past, getting buffering issues using caching settings in advancedsettings.xml
Now I have no caching settings and playback is working fine watching high bitrate(65 Mb/sec) 4k videos
The cables are fine, the network is fine. I’ve tested a ton using iperf3. No stability issues. The artifacts issue, I think, is just that the Jellyfish videos are just bad sample content. I’ve moved on from them. Now it’s just the cache not filling fast enough at the start, sometimes. It just fills like 1MB for 20 seconds and then all the sudden starts filling to 300MB (meaning 100MB cache x3 in RAM)
UPDATE: Replacing my Linksys EA9500 router with a new ASUS AX88U, with Streaming prioritization enabled, solved my problem. I’m shocked. It’s night and day. Before, 1 stream of 4K remux choked. Now I can do many