[cruse]

I started using the latest stable ServerWMC two days ago with Jarvis RC 2, experiencing heavy buffering after starting Live TV or after channel switching on a premium dvb-s2 tuner (FloppyDTV), while everything was working smooth in WMC itself.

You can get rid of that caching and buffering by doing the following:

1) Open ServerWMC user interface in Windows desktop
2) Go to tab "Debug"
3) Click on "Edit Settings File"
4) Search for the "PlayBack" section and the line "BufferDelayLiveMS"
5) Change the value from 0 to e.g. 3000
6) Save the edited file
7) Click "Reload Settings File" in ServerWMC's "Debug" tab

In my case 3000ms gives Kodi a 50% buffer headstart after starting/switching channels, enabling smooth playback afterwards whether HD or SD content. I imagine this value might be different on different hardware and it's just a question of finetuning by repeating those steps with different values to find the threshold.

With a value of 0ms on my hardware the playback buffer after starting/switching channels is just ~15% and often times drops to 0% resulting in (sometimes non recovering) caching/buffering.

Great job ServerWMC devs, using Window's builtin PVR capabilities. Apart from those buffering hickups (which are not your fault) this is by far the easiest way with the least overhead to get live tv running in Windows Kodi.

[scarecrow420]

Thanks for sharing... This setting obviously is at the cost of time delay when switching channels ?

Might be useful to mention your hardware/network involved

[cruse]

Sure thing, all this is running on a capable dual core HTPC with dedicated nVidia GPU and Gigabit Lan with a FloppyDTV dvb-s2 Firewire Tuner as a server/client all in one.

In my case there are also delays with a value of 0ms while switching channels. 3000ms might add a bit but doesn't seem that big of a difference (besides not resulting in a stuttering TV experience), for sure there are no additional 3 seconds. Guess it depends where in the chain the delay is set, maybe it's already buffering while there are some other things to do in server and Kodi before playback.

And of course this is satellite reception, which is prone to slight delays. I remember zapping through cable channels on a PC in a matter of nanoseconds when I used that. That's just not possible with (european) sat reception in my experience.

As mentioned above, maybe this can be finetuned down to 2000 or less, but I'm happy as it is.