[nevereven]

I'm trying to stream HD content from my server PC to a HTPC over wifi.
I was using SMB, but for 1080 content it re-buffers often. Some investigation seems to point to SMB being the bottleneck not wifi (N).
I'm looking for an alternative that, and this is very important, uses local per-user password authentication. This means that Plex is not an option AFAIK.

I thought WebDAV would be perfect so I set up the IIS server on port 8000 (all media) and port 8001 (kids media). I can see and download my media from a browser at: hostname:8000 and hostname:8001 but I can not get Kodi to connect from the same machine.

I'm using the path in Kodi:
dav://username:password@hostname:8001/

Any one get this to work ?

Also, not sure if this is a bug, but when you add
WebDAV server (HTTP) you get "davs:..."
and when you add
WebDAV server(HTTPS) you get "dav:..."
Is this backwards?

[nevereven]

After several house of fruitless attempts I gave up on WebDAV. I just can't find anyone who will admit to seeing it work.
I've now decided to try ftp.
I've set up an ftp server to which I can connect via the command line and download files, but I can't get kodi to connect at all.

Log says:

20:38:10 T:4356 DEBUG: CurlFile::Open(01699FF8) ftp://USERNAME:[email protected]:20001/
20:38:10 T:4356 INFO: XCURL:llLibCurlGlobal::easy_aquire - Created session to ftp://192.168.1.23
20:38:10 T:4356 ERROR: CCurlFile::FillBuffer - Failed: Login denied(67)
20:38:10 T:4356 ERROR: CCurlFile::CReadState::Connect, didn't get any data from stream.
20:38:10 T:4356 ERROR: XFILE::CDirectory::GetDirectory - Error getting ftp://USERNAME:[email protected]:20001/

I hope USERNAME and PASSWORDS are just obfuscating the real ones.

[DJ_Izumi]

In my experience, the built in SMB client in Kodi is VERY picky about any kind of 'lag'. This went so far as having Kodi machines accessing media over SMB over Wifi 'buffering' but what seems to actually happen is that the SMB server didn't respond in the INSTANT it expected due to the WIFI connection and it gave up on the file. In one case enabling 'Xbox Mode' for the radio (Asus RT-AC66U) which is seemingly a feature for lag intolerant applications like gaming solved it. ...So did Ethernet. However SO did just mounting those SMB in the operating system, using the OS as the SMB client instead, and accessing those files via the local mount.

I think this is a major cause of 'mysterious' buffering problems that some have faced that seemed to evade any solution or rational. I've also seen a dev even admit that the SMB client in Kodi is kinda not so good.

So I'd suggest trying to just mount the SMB shares locally on the client machine and having Kodi access those mounted drives locally rather than with it's own SMB client.

I also found a nice old fashioned Ethernet connection great too, but I understand that's not suitable for everyone.