I wondered if anyone could explain why my OSMC (running originally on an RP1 B+ and now on an RP2) is always slower at streaming than anything else in the house. It’s connected by Ethernet whilst all other connecions are wireless. I have tried several clean installs but repeatedly when I’m having trouble streaming, the problem is solved if I stream the same file to my laptop.
I haven’t included logs since I felt that since the problem hasn’t been solved by clean installs or by changing the device it may lie elsewhere. If you feel that logs would be useful then I’m happy to send them on.
Fair point but, to stretch the metaphor, I saw it more as comparing an entire fruit basket (laptop capable of doing many things) to an apple (only able to do one thing but do it well).
Is this just something that I have to accept or is there anything that I can do?
Since you’ve provided no other explanation other than “it’s slow” (what exactly is slow?) and zero diagnostic information such as logs, we have no idea if you even have a legitimate problem.
On a laptop with a wired connection, the laptop has a network card that has ‘smarts’ to handle low level traffic. So the laptops CPU has little involvement with handling the network traffic.
On a Pi, the wired connection is via a USB device (hidden from you, but it’s USB). So there is no network card to handle the low level traffic. The Pi CPU has to handle all of that traffic, plus everything else.
The result is that the Pi will just never be able to match network performance (wired) of a laptop.
Wireless is a little different in that the CPU of the laptop will also be involved with the low level traffic, but the CPU in the laptop is still probably much more powerful than the Pi CPU, so same results.
Thanks for the advice from both of you. I had suspected that it was a case of hardware but I had hoped otherwise.
To clarify, by slow I mean that at times when the ADSL line to our house is slow (Sunday evenings for example) the Pi will sit there for hours buffering and never get started where as the laptop (connected by wifi) will stream straight off and play uninterrupted. I’ll post up a log when I get home.
One idea that I had was was to get a router with QoS and giving the Pi priority over everything else. Any thoughts on this?
