Please help me stop my baby from crying because kodi keeps buffering
The toddler loves having Kodi full of all their faves but I haven’t been able to iron out all the buffering I’m getting streaming from my mini-pc NFS mounted shares to the pi4 libreelec hooked up via Ethernet in the living room. Everything is wired, so I wouldn’t think that would be an issue but here I am about to put down a couple hundred dollars for a Synology router that looks like the monolith from 2001. Is this going to do the trick, you think? Is there another router recommended to keep a distributed little homelab (any 10tb spread between various usb hdd, raspberry pi’s and mini PCs all hosting a variety of containers and services) running smoothly? Budget I’m hoping to keep under 300 and lower the better but happy toddler and buttery smooth streaming over lan is the priority.
I'm not sure about how this works in kodi but in jellyfin the client might request a different resolution which causes the server to try and reencode the provided file on the fly. In my case my server isn't fast enough for this which leads to constant buffering
Likely, This is it.
It transcodes and hence it has to buffer because the server isn't strong enough. Best is to use a gpu like intel a380 as described in jellyfin's doc.
No no transcoding happening on kodi, it’s just playing it straight over the lan. That said I do have jellyfin set up on a machine that can handle transcoding for a number of clients. I gave considered switching to Kodi +Jellyfin and seeing if that’s better.
Installing the Jellyfin add on into kodi takes a few minutes. Nothing much to consider, just try it and see if that changes anything.
I have a similar setup (rpi with OSMC, media hosted on file server) and prefer using Jellyfin as the source for all clients, as it keeps track of watched status across everything. It's not perfect, but better than without Jellyfin.
I havent used kodi in a long time, since swapping to jellyfin. I personally found kodi would always buffer sometimes, far more than it should ever need to. With jellyfin, same server, no buffer
There's no backend server to do the transcoding in this case. Kodi can access raw NFS/SMB file shares the same as accessing local storage, so it's just reading the file over the network, the same as if you were playing it in VLC on your PC.