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Please help me stop my baby from crying because kodi keeps buffering (ttrpg.network)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I'd lean towards the pi being the problem, but you can test the network throughput with iperf, and would want to test the videos outside of Kodi on the pi, so you could also check top and see what the processing looks like.

If I remember my pi 4 hardware decoding specs correctly, I believe h.264, MPEG 2, and VC1, and some support for HEVC. If I had to guess, you may have some codecs that aren't handled by hardware acceleration, and instead just CPU.

My best rec would be to use either a dedicated stream box (like a fire stick, Nvidia shield, etc) which has better codec support, or pick up like a little Intel n100 based system, which will handle a drastically wider set of codecs with full acceleration support.

Right now I've got a Roku and a Google TV Chromecast, and I've been trying with various environments on an old Lenovo m910q so I can find my favorite fit of UI/distro. The Roku and Chromecast never stutter, and I don't do transcoding for inside the home. Works with 4K HDR HEVC no problem.

Edit: Autocorrect annoyances.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Thanks, really appreciate the thoughtful response. I have an intel n100 NUC actually on the network. It used to be the jellyfin machine but has shifted to other duties. I probably should have tried to throw that in and reconfigure things but I just went with the OSMC Vero box which should tick all the necessary hardware boxes to at least free that from being the problem. Bonus: I get to add the pi4 back to the homelab stack.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

If it turns out to be a Pi bottleneck, you can just re-encode the videos with a lower quality and h.264 codec.