Hi,
Just wanted to post an update for anyone following this thread. Fitted a length of Cat 6 cable from the office where the PC is located to the lounge today and patched it into my network. 4K now works fine and iperf is showing a much more positive result:
Thanks for the help 
Brill. Glad to hear it. Thanks for following up and letting us know it works well for you now.
Hi Sam,
Everything is still playing fine since I hardwired Vero to the LAN. However, I seem to have a problem when seeking through files. It appears to fast forward and rewind OK, but when I go to play again the audio continues but the video doesn’t move. I then have to press stop, select the file again and choose ‘resume from x’ and it’s fine. Pressing up to skip say 10 minutes seems to be ok, it’s just when I am doing 2x, 4x, 8x etc.
Any ideas what’s wrong please?
Thanks.
Resolving your previous issues by increasing the possible bandwidth between the server and client are indicative of the fact that you were bumping against the speed limits possible in your setup. Asking the device to playback at 2x, 4x, 8x, etc is simply increasing the bitrate again to more than your network is capable of, even in it’s improved condition. ff/rw are really relics of VHS days when there was no other option for moving within a piece of media. You should simply resolve to using the skip step functions provided by the tapping of left/right/up/down keys in this day and age.
Hi
I’m glad playback has improved for you now you’re using Ethernet.
Rewind is a little bit borked in Kodi. For now we recommend using skips. You can use skip steps and customise these.
Sam
Skipping steps…
That is a general problem. For ffw/rew a media player needs to read the stream faster. It is the equivalent in simple terms of having a tape running faster.
If you play back something at 8 times the speed, well then data needs to be delivered 8 times as fast.
I am oversimplifying here of course. There are some things you can do though…
Sure with some huge buffer and some clever non linear read ahead approach you can make it work. That’s what decent modern Bluray players are doing. They are caching a ton into RAM during playback and also hold a keyframe buffer as well and even create a new buffers on the fly for scrobbling using data gathered before. And that is no problem because of local media, which can deliver data up to a certain point very fast (but naturally they limit the speed as well). Early Bluray players couldn’t do it properly either. The PVR functions in TVs work similar, though largely relying on more information in the transport stream for some “hacks”.
It is similar like when you scrobble through a Netflix or Youtube stream. Sooner or later bandwidth is the problem unless the whole video (or larger parts of it) remains in cache.
I basically got use to skipping steps since I started to watch 720p/1080p content a decade ago.
And every video player has the same problem as they all use the same approach: Fill up buffer, play from buffer. You play faster then data needs to comes in faster. And sooner or later the buffer is starving, especially over networks. No real evolution here except a few things like timeline scrobbling to extract keyframes.
And no one really bothers to implement some more tricky caching/buffering as people got used to skip steps anyway. So lowest possible priority for video player developers to address this.
Yeah, get used to skipping steps. After after a while you don’t mind it anymore…
Sure better buffering in Kodi in general would be nice, but don’t hold your breath to ever seeing it.
Nice thing is you can customize the skip steps at least to your day to day requirements.
Try to play with cache in advanced settings
For me and H264 files it’s works fine now with
<cache> <memorysize>25600000</memorysize> <buffermode>1</buffermode> <readfactor>5</readfactor> </cache>
For me (and my network configuration) more memory size done nothing more better, and probably can push down.
readfactor is very interesting for play for/back issues. For me the settings are for 4 → 6-8.
Bigger readfactor (in my configuration) degrade read performce
Michael