I know that Sam recommends using fstab-mounted file shares for better speed and stability. However, this breaks the WOL feature of Kodi.
Bummer. Now I have to go back and reconfigure everything again.
Why do I use WOL? Because I live off-grid (solar and battery) and power is precious. I don’t need my 4 WD reds and a whole server slurping power in the middle of the night. I’ve measured it. It amounts to close to 100W!
For those who are grid-tied, this may not sound like a big deal… But it’s the same thing as leaving the bright headlights on your car (usually about 55W each) on all night on just the car battery. You wouldn’t do that, now would you?
Do any of you know of a way to trigger the WOL subsystem in Kodi when it attempts to access any file, regardless of whether Kodi thinks it’s locally mounted or not?
You’ve not said whether you’re using SMB or NFS but in your fairly unique situation I reckon it makes more sense to use Kodi’s internal system since (a) you can then switch off Kodi at night, either manually or via a cron job (sudo systemctl stop mediacenter) and (b) you won’t have any hassles with keepalives being sent to your server from OSMC.
The WOL add-on that Sam referred to can be run manually or configured to run when Kodi starts. If you’ve shut mediacenter/Kodi down for the night, it can therefore be configured to run at Kodi startup.
I use SMB, just because It’s a little easier to config. But I’m no stranger (nor am I oppsed) to NFS.
I generally don’t shut down the Kodi boxes (since they run on Raspi and soon Vero) and that means power-cycling them to reboot that that fails the “wife test.” So, I leave them on 24/7… They consume <10w each, so I can balance that load vs the wife factor ok.
So, configuring Advanced WOL to “WOL on Kodi Start” won’t work, since telling the wife, “ok…if it’s night time and the server is off, you have to go to the power menu and reboot the Modi box” TOTALLY fails the wife test.
So, It looks like I will be going back to the internal SMB mounting. Not that big an issue, really, since I’ve been using that method for years anyway. It’s worked just fine for everything I’ve tried to play until now.
Now that I have a Vero 4k coming, I’d like to get some 4k content in my collection. So, network performance may soon be an issue. I won’t know until I test it. Since the Vero 4K only has 100Mbit ethernet, I hope that the inefficiencies in the Kodi SMB mounting library won’t cause a problem.
Also, Sam says that there are some improvements coming down the line, so hopefully these inefficiencies will be a moot point soon.
I guess the follow-on question would be… Since I will be using the built-in Kodi mounting library, is NFS significantly better than SMB?
Luckily, my server has a Gbit connection to a Gbit switch. So the server can hand out several 100Mb streams with no issue. So it all comes down to the 100Mb connections and the protocol used.
Just to be clear here, I’m not proposing that you shut down the Pi, just that you stop Kodi, while leaving the operating system alone. It can all be controlled from cron, so your wife never needs to deal with all the unspeakable technical stuff. Like with a heating controller, you can schedule when Kodi should be running or switched off.