I am running OSMC on a Raspberry Pi 2, and in general am very happy with it. However, it’s in a part of my house where I don’t have nearby wired network, and the wifi is a little flakey.
This wasn’t too much of a problem, until I recently got a Blu-ray drive and started ripping HD content. Obviously the wifi is fast enough in the area to stream SD, but HD buffers badly.
I’ve tried a couple of fixes - I swapped from samba to NFS shares, and bought a wifi dongle with a larger antenna, but the problem persists. I don’t blame this on OSMC, just my network.
Then I noticed the Western Digital PiDrive was on offer, and one is hopefully in the post to me now. My thought was I could use it as a local storage for HD files, potentially as a separate library.
But I was also wondering if there was any clever feature in Kodi or OSMC that might allow me to use the drive more transparent way? Maybe some way to tag media in the GUI to be downloaded and stored locally? Would fiddling with the cache settings, and pointing the cache at the hard disk help? Any advice appreciated.
Although the PiDrive is somewhat optimized for the Pi’s power contraints, I wouldn’t imagine you’d get any benefit from pointing the cache to any HDD. SSDs are another story, but I’d still be somewhat skeptical. On one hand it would allow for optimized non-sequential read/write, not really found in SD cards, but on the other hand, the trouble and cost might outweigh the minimal benefits you’d see.
I have a similar wifi problem in my basement, and have found internet over power lines to work well. Have you considered this option? Something like this:
Yeah, I’d suspect using a standard cache on the PiDrive probably isn’t great - doesn’t it run at 3400 RPM?
What I’m really after is some kind of semi-intelligent caching, eg if I start playing a show, the OS realises and downloads the other episodes when idle in the background? I’m not sure if that’s even feasible but I thought I’d ask…
I have powerline adaptors available, yes, but not the sockets available to set them up. I’ve found the ones that aren’t too expensive aren’t much better than a low speed wifi in any case.
Without being rude, I asked the question re: the hard drive because I’ve already bought it and wondered if I could do something interesting with it and OSMC. I didn’t ask how to improve my home network, which I wouldn’t ask on the specific OSMC forums anyway.