[elparrasito]

Hi all xbmc users. Please forgive me for if i have posted this in the wrong area. I am a complete novice to xbmc, but what i know is getting me by ok so far trying to learn and understand new things all the time. At home i use orange/EE broadband, receiving average speeds of 18mbps, not bad considering i live on the east coast and do not have any fibre speeds available to me. Downloading movies etc is ok, reasonably quick, i can live with it. However, when i want to watch live tv, mainly sports, i suffer from really bad lag, constantly buffering. Is this because my internet speed isn't quick enough or could it be because my isp are strangling my speeds, i've heard they do this when streaming video and using p2p. which ever may be the cause can i ask people how to improve the playing of live tv, i.e which is the best isp for using xbmc, better config on xbmc settings, or maybe better pc setting.
By the way i run xbmc on my windows 8 laptop, aspire E1-571, intel core i5-3230M, 2.6GHz with turbo boost to 3.2GHz, 4gb DDR3 memory, intel HD graphics 4000, up to 1760MB dynamic video memory.
hope i've explained myself well enough and once again apologise if i've posted in wrong section.
thank you,
elparrasito.

[Prof Yaffle]

That download speed and PC spec should easily be able to stream HD content. You can use speedtest.net to check your real throughput, but I'd be surprised if it was way off what you'd expect.

ISP throttling, perhaps, or a config issue that prevents XBMC from rendering the stream fast enough? What if you watch the same stream in a browser (e.g. iPlayer HD - I assume you're in the UK by the Orange/EE reference)? Does it happen on all streams, e.g. YouTube? It may be your source, especially if it's ... erm... slightly less than pukka.

[elparrasito]

Hi, thanks for your reply, yes im in the uk. I do sometimes have trouble playing YouTube videos but not all the time. I only really watch live sports on xbmc using sports devil or K1mo5 or kash sports, but generally any link I cklick on either doesn't play or will not buffer quick enough, even links on navi x. Untill I got xbmc I always used wiziwig and before myp2p.eu ti watxh live football, and never really had any problems. This season though wiziwig has struggled playing so I now try and use xbmc but its much worse. Previously I have only been getting speeds of 2mbps on same isp but I upgraded to get much faster speeds thinking it would help, but this hasn't been the case.

[Prof Yaffle]

Then I'd conclude it's your source material. I've no idea how any of those addons work, and most conversation about them is verboten on this board anyway (see here), but that'd be my conclusion.

Find a HD stream on iPlayer and see if it plays. If it does, then it's not your client config, and it's not likely to be ISP traffic shaping on streaming video. You can also test legal P2P and torrents (e.g. LibreOffice, Ubuntu) to see what that gives you, and thus potentially eliminate any ISP effect there. And then, if it's something about the file hosts you're connecting to... that's a conversation for another support forum, I suspect.

[elparrasito]

thank you Prof Yaffle, i'll do some more research and try other players to see if i can narrow down reasons. i will come back and post my findings in the appropriate section as and when i get the results. Thank you for your advice.

[TerrorKeed]

XBMC uses a single HTTP request to handle streams but those with robust data speeds wont notice this... for this to utilize your entire speed is for a module/workaround for.multi-threaded http stream

Edit : There is a proxy currently inndevelopemtn by Eldorado called "script.module.axeldownloader"

[dgcruzing]

That sounds interesting, will keep an eye out for it