I read it’s better to go with NFS to get better performance streaming. My main box with my videos is a windows box and it seems that support has dropped. Does anyone use NFS to stream and fix teh buffer issues on 1080P movies? I read one post where someone used cygwin.
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A little more background on your setup would be helpful.
You left out two extremely important pieces of information relevant to streaming performance across different network protocols:
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Do you have a Raspberry Pi 1 or Raspberry Pi 2 ?
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Are you using Ethernet from one end to the other or is a Wifi link involved ?
I have tried both ethernet and wifi and both have the same results. I have the 512mb Pi 1. I have also tried to edit the advancedsettings.xml with no luck
<advancedsettings>
<network>
<buffermode>0</buffermode> <!-- Comment: Default is 1 -->
<cachemembuffersize>62914560</cachemembuffersize> <!-- Comment: Default is 2097$
<readbufferfactor>2</readbufferfactor> <!-- Comment: Default is 1.0 -->
</network>
</advancedsettings>Attempting to use 63mb is a mistake. You are going to starve your pi for RAM at this setting.
Quoted from http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Modify_the_video_cache#Cache_settings -
Note: For the memory size set here, Kodi will require 3x the amount of RAM to be free. Setting this too high might cause Kodi to crash if it can’t get enough RAM.
20mb (the default for a 512 pi) should be more than enough to buffer content from a local network source. What is the size, bitrate, and format of the files you are attempting to play?
some of them are over 10GB in size. Blu-ray rips What should my advancedsettings look like?
This doesn’t address the bitrates or format of the files. Can you provide mediainfo on a file that does not play properly? Instructions on doing so are in my necessary info sticky at the top of the forum here.
I would remove your edits or comment them out completely which would allow OSMC to use it’s default settings.
You appear to be trying to use an advancedsettings file from somewhere (an OE install??) I wouldn’t suggest doing so… While many things are similar, much more are not the same and you could be creating more problems by doing this. OSMC’s default advancedsettings have already been optimized for most use cases.
A Pi 1 will not be able to stream full bitrate (>30Mbps) blu-ray rips over a network using the built in SMB client.
To get it to work acceptably you’ll need to do a little work:
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Overclock as high as you reasonably can whilst still staying stable - on my Pi 1 I used to overclock to arm frequency 1000, core 500.
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Use kernel mode NFS using UDP and an rsize and wsize of 8192.
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Make sure omxplayer is enabled in system settings. (It should be by default on a Pi 1)
Kernel mode NFS means adding an entry in /etc/fstab to mount an NFS share to a directory such as /mnt/mynas and then adding /mnt/mynas as the source in Kodi, rather than trying to add an NFS source directly in Kodi. (Which is much slower)
You should be able to find some recommended fstab lines for NFS mounts by searching the forum - just make sure you include udp not tcp, and have rsize=8192,wsize=8192.
With those optimisations it should just be possible to play full blu-ray rips without buffering, however there is not much CPU power to spare, so not much safety margin.
The other alternative is to get a Pi 2 which is much faster and has no difficulty streaming full rate blu-ray rips even over a basic SMB share and without any additional overclocking.
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how do you setup NFS then? windows doesn’t seem to support NFS anymore
bump. is there a guide the the NFS information?
I think most versions of Windows (Professional editions or better) have a built in NFS client, but not sure about server. It can be enabled via Programs and Features. I set up the client with:
dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:ClientForNFS-Base
It’s possible only Windows Server offers this.
Hanewin NFS server (Networking Software for Windows) is another option that works well for me.
It is not free, but you can trial it for a month for free to see if it helps.
okay. My NFS server is setup. My fstab looks like this:
192.168.30.10:/e /home/osmc/Movies nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,tcp,cto,noatime,intr,x-systemd.automount,noauto,nfsvers=3 0 0
Testing steams
well it appears to be running like a champ! MKV’s over wifi no issues now. Pretty sweet!
I would like to know how much an advantage using fstab nfs mounts has over using the nfs protocol in Kodi. I converted to nfs from smb on my Pi 2 even though I had yet to run into any issues because I wanted to avoid any future ones because converting later would have been quite lame. Should I have gone all the way or is the nfs protocol in Kodi enough?
If you are not having issues then you’ve done enough, fstab NFS will have better throughput though (at the cost of being a little more awkward to set up).
looks like I may have spoken too soon. Still having the pausing/ buffering issues. CPU load is only at 20% too. Also seems to do this during live streams as well.
Have you purchased the mpeg2 and vc1 codecs?
Try udp instead of tcp in the mount options. In my testing udp gives a lot better performance on a Pi 1 than tcp.
Can the OP provide the media info with regards to the media being played.
Thanks.