[LoopinFool]

Here's my setup for remote streaming: I have a QNAP NAS with TVHeadend handling PVR duties for OTA recording (MPEG2). I use Kodi on the NAS and various other devices (with a shared database) to stream those recordings. When remote, I can VPN into the home network so that I can seamlessly do the same. I have a 20Mb/s upstream connection.

When all systems were on Helix, this worked great even for HD streams via the VPN. They usually max out at around 15Mb/s and I was able to stream quite well both via SMB paths and the TVH live TV clients.

Now that all the systems are on Isengard I am having problems streaming remotely. I have only tested it on my Macbook Pro, but that's the one I've always used for this.
Through both SMB paths and the TVH live TV plugin, Kodi can no longer saturate the 20Mb/s link. It appears to barely get over 10Mb/s so I can no longer smoothly stream any HD content. Since both network interfaces have the same issue, I'm guessing it's due to the poor latency of the internet link and at a low-level basic networking layer.
Remember that it used to work well in Helix, especially after the typical advancedsettings.xml buffer tweaks. No amount of tweaking those will fix this issue in Isengard.

If I use the OS to mount the remote share as a local directory, I can use Kodi to stream from that path and it works well and can even read ahead, though the buffer filling has a different pattern (no surprise there).
For now, I'm using the mount and path substitution feature to have functional HD streaming, but that still doesn't solve streaming via the Live TV interface - and I need to remember to mount the share after connecting the VPN (yet another step to set it up).

Thanks for any insight, especially from developers who might have a clue what changed between 14.x and 15.x.

- LoopinFool

[LoopinFool]

Update:
This is still an issue in Jarvis 16.1RC1 on my Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 system.

Jarvis _may_ be a little better than Isengard but that could be my imagination. I re-installed 14.2 Helix on my Macbook and verified that right now with my link to home via the internet, I can cleanly stream HD MPEG2. Seeking is fast and it almost never runs out of buffer even with the default settings.
Newer Kodi versions can not stream HD cleanly over this link. The link has high latency and less than twice the necessary bandwidth, but Helix streams great.

Both PVR (TVHeadend) recording and SMB streaming are slower than they used to be. One potentially interesting data point: Live channel streaming from my HDHomerun tuners through Isengard keeps up just fine.

I'm refreshing this thread in the hopes that someone can take a look at this. I really like the improvements I just saw in Jarvis, but I'm sad that some basic streaming is worse than it used to be (at least on the Mac).

- LoopinFool

PS - Did some testing on my new Android phone - seeing the same issue (can't stream HD recorded MPEG2 content smoothly but can stream live TV)
When I can, I'll do more testing (including on Windows) and likely post the issue in a non-OS-specific forum.

[Memphiz]

just say so and we move this thread to os independend (no need for a new thread)

[LoopinFool]

Thank you.

I finally got OpenVPN and Kodi installed on a Windows system. This system is hard-wired to the network so there's no way WiFi performance can be involved.

I verified the same significant performance drop through the pvr: protocol interface (using the TVHeadend addon). There was also a noticeable performance drop for smb: shares like on the Mac, but I don't think it's quite as bad. This was tested on a Windows 8.1 system - comparing Helix 14.2 to Isengard 15.2.

I agree that this thread should be moved to an OS independent area. I will try to find time to test with Jarvis and Krypton on Windows and Mac to see how they compare.
I realize it can be a pain to set up an OpenVPN router/server in order to test this, and across-the-internet connections can vary. Please let me know if there's any specific logging I can provide that may help isolate where in the network/streaming stack this got worse over high-latency connections.

Thanks,
- LoopinFool