Playback not working on the Raspberry Pi 3 - Streaming

1st Official Post

    Good Evening,

    I am getting a little frustrated at the moment and hoping for some support. Basically all my content is hosted on my own media server in the cloud and I stream everything from it. When I try to play a SD format file it plays for a short time then the buffering progress comes up and it pauses. After quite some time then says that the playback source is too slow and starts to play but inevitably becomes unwatchable. HD content unplayable all together.

    This is using a Raspberry Pi 3 currently on WiFi but I tested with LAN cable and exactly the same.

    If I install Kodi on my laptop with the exact same configuration using WiFi it works perfectly. No buffering at all even with HD content just plays.

    I have tried playing with advanced settings to increase the buffer and read speed but to no avail.

    Please can someone assist? I am on 8.0.2.

    THanks,

    Max

    • Official Post

    The built-in wifi on the RPi3 is not of the greatest quality. So either a better usb wifi dongle, or better yet, a cable connection will improve things anyway.

    For the rest, provide a kodi.log file for all the internal details.

    • Official Post

    How are you accessing the files? SMB, uPNP, NFS. What are the format of the files? MP4, x264 or HEVC?

    The RPi3 internal wifi is good enough for SD but you'll struggle with HD. Is your router setup for 2.4Mhz dual band as that might help.

    Your laptop on ethernet is probably 1000 base T whereas the RPi is 100 base T so not a good comparison. Also if there is any I/O on USB then that could affect the speed. However, ethernet should be sufficient for SD and HD on the RPi

    If your RPi is hidden away, try moving it around so it has a better "view" of the router. You could try a 5Ghz wifi adapter, which will give you better speeds - assuming your router has it.

    However, it does sound like a "normal" connection issue and nothing to do with LE. You'll need to diagnose each network leap to determine the bottleneck.

    You could upgrade to 8.1.2 and see if that helps