Issues with XBMC / Kodi (Buffering all the time)

[Pandora]

Hi all!

I did set up FreeNAS recently and now I'm running into a strange issue, when using XBMC/Kodi.

When I watch a 1080p movie (tried with various movies of course) which is stored/shared on FreeNAS, I get pretty bad performance. The movie buffers really a lot and for at least 10 seconds (sometimes around 30 seconds).
When the same movie is stored & shared on a normal Windows 8.1 PC, the movie plays in XBMC fast and fluid.

But the NAS has usually great performance, as I can transfer a movie in 5mins or so, having a transfer rate from 80MB/s+. Also the same file, still stored on FreeNAS, plays great on other devices.

• So as the movie plays fine when stored & shared on a normal PC, there doesn't seem to be an issue with XBMC and it's LAN connection itself.
• But since the performance is great, when using any other device than my XBMC-Box, what could it be?

Fyi: I tried with CIFS and with NFS -> same result. I'm using OpenELEC, but KodiBuntu had the same issue.
Here's the log file: http://pastebin.com/WhrfDjeA
I started Kodi, started Avengers 1080p (Log: Line 173), forwarded a little bit into the movie and then it started to buffer - play - buffer - play ... And then i stopped it.

Any help is highly appreciated! :)

Cheers

P.S: I'm also going to post this in the Kodi-Forum, as currently it's not a clear Kodi but also not a clear FreeNAS issue

 

[ipsum]

Did you try playing around with the cache/buffer size?

I remember running into a similar issue years ago with one of the older XBMC builds, and that improved things greatly.

 

[Pandora]

I did, sadly with no effect.
As said, streaming to any other client performs great.

 

[ipsum]

How about your audio setup?

I once accidentally set the settings wrong and everything played back somewhat choppy after.


Can you stream via VLC or do you experience stutter there as well? If so, this would point not to an XBMC issue but to a problem with that particular machine.

 

[Pandora]

As stated in my first post: When streaming from my desktop computer (so xbmc pulls the movie data from windows 8.1 instead of freenas), everything works great. So i don't think that there's an audio issue.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

What's the hardware of your OpenELEC box?
What's the load on the client when playing this file?

I have multiple FreeNAS+OpenELEC (ion2/celeron) builds in production and have never had an issue with buffering when using NFS streaming over a wired LAN.

 

[Pandora]

Hardware should be fine, as it's running from other sources perfectly, as stated.

i7 CPU with 8GB Ram and 64GB SSD

It did work perfectly, before i switched to freenas (was using Windows Server 2012 as fileserver [with a software raid]).

 

[nemohj]

Hi

I had these symptoms just a few weeks ago, when installing Kodi on my PC (used to only run it on my Pi). Supposedly "alwaysforcebuffer" doesn't work, but my problems magically disappeared when I added this as my advancedsettings.xml:

Code:

<advancedsettings>
  <network>
    <alwaysforcebuffer>1</alwaysforcebuffer>
    <cachemembuffersize>20971520</cachemembuffersize>
  </network>
</advancedsettings>

Hope it helps.

 

[Pandora]

I finally figured it out, after several different things, like playing around with advancedsettings.xml and so on.
And in the end, it was really easy: the cable. I just replaced the ethernet cable which went from on of my switches into my HTPC (altough it was a 5e already) and voilà, works as expected.

But still, I don't get it. Why is the cable okay when pulling data from a share on my Windows PC, but produces terrible lags/bufferings when using a CIFS share from FreeNAS?

Either way, that proofs it again: Whatever you think is not necessary to test, is still worth to test.