(SOLVED) How to find root cause for buffering with 4K content?

[klaaatu]

I stream from an unRAID box, and am getting really bad buffering with 4K content, doesn’t happen with 1080p. I don’t have a 4K screen, yet, so I’m downsampling on the go with Vero 4K+. How do I figure out whether my wired LAN speeds are the issue, or the downsampling?

[dillthedog]

[How To] Check Network Performance with iperf3

Sometimes it is important to check the network performance between your OSMC Device and the device providing your media (NAS, Server, PC). Especially when you are connected via wireless the throughput variations can harm you viewing experience. This short How To should give you the required information how to install iperf3 and how to run the respective tests. When doing these tests it is suggested to have a simple setup (single switch between Sender and Receiver and avoid other traffic on the …

[klaaatu]

Thanks for the link, should have searched first…

I get speeds of 92+ mbits per second in both directions testing with iperf3 which should be fast enough to stream UHD bluray rips (40 GB or smaller per two hours), so that suggests network is not the issue, and it’s the downsampling?

[darwindesign]

@klaaatu

so that suggests network is not the issue, and it’s the downsampling?

Not quite. Iperf is rather low level so there is other factors involved. You might try a system mount as Kodi paths are not always the most performant.

Configuring fstab based Samba share mounts

This tutorial is to help those who are using Samba (also known as CIFS, SMB or Windows Networking). It assumes that you already are sharing media files on a Windows Server or Desktop. Why use /etc/fstab instead of Kodi’s built in SMB client? The Kodi client in current versions (17.x and older) is slow. Using /etc/fstab is faster, and not really that hard to setup. EDIT: 11/1/2019 While improvements were made in Kodi 18.x, using fstab will still be faster. Preparation: You will need to know …

To find out if you had an issue that was not network related you would have to actually take the network out of the equation. This would normally entail copying a file to USB storage and playing it from there to see if your problems persist.

[klaaatu]

I mounted via fstab (had to reboot, mounting from CLI didn’t work for some reason even as root), and did a quick test with UHD streaming and it worked really well!

Thank you for the quick and very helpful guidance!