Advanced Settings - Killing Kodi
#1
Hello,

I've read a few posts about the best (advanced) settings for Kodi (Helix) on Raspberry Pi. However, no matter what I try I can't get them to work. When I add the advancedsettings.xml file to "/storage/.kodi/userdata" Kodi will not play a single file, no matter the quality (480p, 720p, 1080p). I get the spinning wheel of death ("Working") and then it times out saying there was an error and to check the log file. When I delete the .xml file, everything will play, albeit with stops and stutters which is why I went down this road in the first place. Here's my setup:

Raspberry Pi 2 with 1GB RAM
128GB Premium SD card.
-connecting via WIFI to Western Digital NAS (Samba) where my library is located.

The files range from 250MB to 4GB with a bitrate from 200k to 4 Mbps.

Here are the advanced settings:

buffermode = 1 (if I need to set this to zero, the rest is pointless b/c it won't utilize the cache for local content, right?)
cachemembuffersize = 40 (ideally I'd like to use "0" since I have a huge SD card but I thought this might be the issue so I changed it to mem, and a lower value)
readbufferfactor = 2

When the issue occurs, for whatever reason I need to refresh the wifi connection for ANYTHING to stream (even Youtube) and Kodi can no longer find the Samba source. Once I refresh the wifi connection I can stream Youtube but no content will stream over my LAN.

Link to Advanced Settings XML: advancedsettings.xml
Link to Log File: Log File

My apologies if this is covered elsewhere...I looked but I couldn't find a problem with the same parameters.

Any help that could be provided is much appreciated.
Thanks,
Matt
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#2
It would be great if you used a pastebin site for your settings and logs.

Does it work if you use a network cable?
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#3
I had this problem. It is the wifi it just sucks on the pi. Use a lan cable. It fixed my problem.
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#4
Those settings are doing the exact opposite of what you want to do. You've set it to 40 bytes when the default is 20971520 bytes. I don't think it can even buffer a single second of video if you use 40.

However, I don't think this has anything to do with the cache/buffer, or even wifi or wired. In the log Kodi doesn't seem to have any access to any of the files. It's hard to say, because you don't have debugging enabled, so please post a new log, without any advancedsettings.xml file, following these steps:

log file/Easy (wiki)
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#5
(2015-04-27, 07:29)Ned Scott Wrote: Those settings are doing the exact opposite of what you want to do. You've set it to 40 bytes when the default is 20971520 bytes. I don't think it can even buffer a single second of video if you use 40.

^^^This. But it will need to buffer something in order to play, surely. Mine is set to zero as I have a 160GB HDD to play with. I'd also set the readbufferfactor to 1, as 2 will require at least 72 M/bits per second of network bandwidth.
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#6
(2015-04-27, 10:17)speedwell68 Wrote: ^^^This. But it will need to buffer something in order to play, surely. Mine is set to zero as I have a 160GB HDD to play with. I'd also set the readbufferfactor to 1, as 2 will require at least 72 M/bits per second of network bandwidth.

That shouldn't be necessary. It should be safe to set readbufferfactor to 1000 - it will just remove the throttling that occurs.
If setting readbufferfactor higher causes a problem then that is a bug, not the intended behaviour.

There was a bug fix here which is in nightly builds, but not I think in Helix builds.
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#7
(2015-04-27, 07:29)Ned Scott Wrote: Those settings are doing the exact opposite of what you want to do. You've set it to 40 bytes when the default is 20971520 bytes. I don't think it can even buffer a single second of video if you use 40.

However, I don't think this has anything to do with the cache/buffer, or even wifi or wired. In the log Kodi doesn't seem to have any access to any of the files. It's hard to say, because you don't have debugging enabled, so please post a new log, without any advancedsettings.xml file, following these steps:

log file/Easy (wiki)

Yes, sorry...typo on the XML file. Will run with debugging enabled. Someone in the forum may have it it on the head...Raspberry Pi2 WIFI sucks. I keep losing connection to my SMB shares in addition to the buffering issue. I would use LAN cable but i have no CAT45 in my living room. perhaps it's time to dust off my WIFI repeaters, although I've never had much luck with those. Will do some troubleshooting and report back.
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#8
Ok, the issue with SMB is occurring on line 7732 of log: http://xbmclogs.com/pqa0xpxtg#line-7732

I'm going to try check "Wait for network before starting KODI". I also found someone in the Kodi blogs that advised to set a hosts file as /storage/.config/hosts.conf. Perhaps someone could comment on these 2 suggestions.

Before I tried the above, however, I tinkered around with the sources until my SMB source came back. Could there be a timer that, when expired, Kodi will check or "refresh" SMB connections?
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