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.
Leave Kodi behind in 2010 and switch over to Jellyfin for better results.
FWIW I have jellyfin as well already, it’s also on the machine serving the nfs shares. I would expect streaming over lan to always be a lighter load then sending a transcoding request through the internet and back to the machine four feet away, but I could be wrong. I am always curious though what people are using as jellyfin clients for their TVs. How are you actually getting jellyfin into your living room? I had hoped to use a dedicated pi4, and I’ve already gone down the route of trying to boot to a light desktop with an auto loading chrome kiosk window to my jellyfin server, but those results were less than ideal too.
Why would your Jellyfin traffic need to go over the Internet if it’s on your local network? You should be able to install the Jellyfin app on your smart TV/Roku/etc or use the web client from a computer, point it at the Jellyfin local IP address, and view it over your LAN.
Traffic for a local Jellyfin server should definitely not be going over the internet. Also any reasonably modern client should be able to direct play most media without transcoding.
As for my own Jellyfin setup, one TV has an Nvidia shield plugged in and is using the standard Android TV client. The other is a Samsung smart TV onto which I have side-loaded the Jellyfin Tizen app.
You know once I expose a service to the internet and get a nice easy to remember url I practically forget that I can still access locally. I should check that out.
I use the Jellyfin for Kodi addon. It’s quite easy to set up and it sounds like you pretty much have everything you need already. Not sure if it could fix your issue but it works great for me.
I use Chromecast to watch jellyfin on my TV. My host PC is hardwired, and obviously the Chromecast is through WiFi
EASY KILLER
I DON’T SEE ANY JELLYFIN DISTROS
“JUST ENOUGH OS FOR JELLYFIN?” no
Though jellyfin/emby as the back end works really well
Kodi/LibreELEC is awesome for all the different stuff you can add in
EDIT for typos
You can install it anywhere. You just run the container with you media directories passed though. They have lots of documentation
It is way easier than Kodi
Oh yeah I am on board with jellyfin and emby all the way 100%
Kodi/LibreELEC is just the full suite, especially with home assistant. Use the addon and enjoy one interface for every single piece of media, cutting out each apps “eye candy” and clutter, and enjoy your tunes with visualizers!
Add-ons for everything
Moonlight for game streaming, tied into my whole home remote control and home assistant for ease of use for everyone in the family.
It’s all pretty slick.
Once you get it setup just make a backup and roll that out on the other machines needed.
Before you buy anything, put some of the same content that buffers on a USB stick or powered drive and play it directly from the pi4. Also connect via ethernet to your router from another PC and check your dl speed from the NFS share.
Oh brilliant. Thanks. Yes. This only tends to happen on larger files, 5gb mkvs or multi audio track deals etc. I was also concerned it’s just a pi4 bottleneck, but that’s fixable too with more hardware. Just need to figure out what to get.
I’d lean towards the pi being the problem, but you can test the network throughput with iperf, and would want to test the videos outside of Kodi on the pi, so you could also check top and see what the processing looks like.
If I remember my pi 4 hardware decoding specs correctly, I believe h.264, MPEG 2, and VC1, and some support for HEVC. If I had to guess, you may have some codecs that aren’t handled by hardware acceleration, and instead just CPU.
My best rec would be to use either a dedicated stream box (like a fire stick, Nvidia shield, etc) which has better codec support, or pick up like a little Intel n100 based system, which will handle a drastically wider set of codecs with full acceleration support.
Right now I’ve got a Roku and a Google TV Chromecast, and I’ve been trying with various environments on an old Lenovo m910q so I can find my favorite fit of UI/distro. The Roku and Chromecast never stutter, and I don’t do transcoding for inside the home. Works with 4K HDR HEVC no problem.
Edit: Autocorrect annoyances.
Thanks, really appreciate the thoughtful response. I have an intel n100 NUC actually on the network. It used to be the jellyfin machine but has shifted to other duties. I probably should have tried to throw that in and reconfigure things but I just went with the OSMC Vero box which should tick all the necessary hardware boxes to at least free that from being the problem. Bonus: I get to add the pi4 back to the homelab stack.
Are you by any chance using flat Ethernet cables? Those are not to spec and are vulnerable to radio noise. Friends don’t let friends buy and use flat Ethernet cables.
Your setup sounds much too complex and misses key information and troubleshooting steps. The flat cables are kind of the cherry on top.
You need to start laying out which devices grab which stuff from where and which cables, switches, routers and panels you are using.
Otherwise people wont be able to help you. A new router isnt going to help you at all.
Example: I run plex on a terra miniserver, stream to my phones and computers over wifi (the server is connected via cat7 wired networking with a tested gigabit connection). I also stream to a libreelec-pi in another room which is also on wifi and has issues sometimes. That is why I‘m gonna wire the connection later this month so that is no issue. I also have an appletv in the livingroom which is connected by wire and has no buffering. There are 3 gigabit switches and a fritz!box also connected but they‘re all gigabit as well: Between PCs and the main router, appletv and the main router and the server and the main router.
It’s really neither much too nor very complex at all. I have a home lab stack of mini PCs and raspberry pi’s in my office hooked up to a switch to my router. Among the stack is an intel nuc with a few attached usb hdd, sharing those drives via NFS and Samba and hosting Jellyfin. The same machine serves jellyfin to my other devices and a few family members over the internet. That machine is more than capable for the task. In order to get that media to the living room I have a raspberry pi 4 running libreelec also hard wired to the Ethernet also to the same switch (running through a cable window in the wall). No, I had not heard of the issues with flat Ethernet cables that are otherwise advertised as cat 7 compatible, because I have (some) of the machines networked with flat Ethernet cables. Those are getting replaced.
For the most part the pi4 libreelec machine handles content fine. But I have a number of multichannel audio, hd not-quite-4k animated movies that do routinely cause buffering issues. It seems most likely upon review and after the comments in this thread that it was a simple bottleneck at the pi4. The same content plays unstuttwring on other more equipped machines on the network. I do think the router is on its way out though and deserves an upgrade but that looks to be an optional next step. I’m replacing the pi as a media machine for now.
Flat cables can be conformant and they still have twisted pairs. Cables just have to meet the physical properties set by the standard.
Your router doesn’t handle LAN traffic so an upgrade shouldn’t make any difference, unless you have multiple VLANs and are passing traffic between them and don’t have a Layer 3 switch in use to handle inter-VLAN routing.
I would probably start with an iperf test for download bandwidth to the Pi from the server. If that looks OK then I would benchmark the NFS share for read speed on the Pi, make sure that’s not doing something weird.
If that all looks good then I would probably suspect that Kodi either isn’t using hardware acceleration properly, or the specific media codec is not supported by the Pi for hardware acceleration.
