Kodi Community Forum

I am in need of some technical advice regarding an xbmc in car project I am working on. Basically the concept is to use a wireless router with an attached external Hard drive to the router USB port. The external hard drive would contain movies in mkv format that were scrapped by media center master. In theory the router would be able to stream the mkv movies to tablets in the car. I have successfully completed attaching external drive locating the movie files via smb protocol and was streaming video to two different tablets. The issue is that the video stream is not fluid. It plays for 5-10 seconds and has a noticeable pause (about .5 seconds) and the video stream resumes only to do the same thing 5-10 seconds later. I need some help in addressing the video streaming problems so I can complete this project.

The following is a list of hardware I am using

1. Netgear wireless ac router R7000
2. Samsung pro tab tm900 12" tablets x 2 with xbmc frodo 12.3 and Aeon Nox Skin running latest Android ver.
3. Lacie external USB 3.0 hard drive (I have tried the samsung 840 ssd with a Sata to USB 3.0 adapter but the router did not recognize it)

I have tried the following to fix the video lag issue:

1. I tried different protocols for acceding the external hard drive: used FTP and smb
2. I tried to increase cache size for xbmc using xmbchub maintenance app and tweaking using 0 cache
3. I made sure to access router on 5Ghz
4. I compressed video to 2-3 Gbs

FYI the router has a connection of 800Mbs connection to the tablets.

At this point I am in need of a little help with configuring to make this work. I hope some of you have some good suggestions as I would really like to have this project work. Some other things I might try would be to purchase a higher rpm 7200 external hard drive. Other than that I am out of suggestions.

Thanks for all the help in advance.
Jdcaduceus

lag? really? XBMC does not transcode videos as of yet. you will experience lag, you will continue to experience lag. wireless router in the car? do you only drive within 200 meters of your house? im so confused...............

edit..........................

let me read that again.....

so you are trying to:

a) have a router in your car, that has an external hard drive attached.
b) have multiple tablets that you want to access the hard drives contents
c) jesus, i don't even know.

This will help explain. See this YouTube clip. It is a very cool idea if you can get it right.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-N4ZiAhZV88

Now you get what I am doing? It's really not a far fetched concept.

Quote:2. I tried to increase cache size for xbmc using xmbchub maintenance app and tweaking using 0 cache

Don't use that horrible "app" on XBMC. Delete it, get rid of it, and don't let it touch XBMC.

1. Nuke the existing XBMC installs so we can be sure that we've gotten rid of anything the hub tool has touched.

2. Use XBMC v13 RC 1 or just wait for the final release of XBMC v13 (see beta (wiki)).

3. If you still have buffering then see HOW-TO:Modify the video cache (wiki). Setting the cache size to 0 does nothing for SMB content for v12.3. You need v13 and the additional advancedsettings.xml tags.

Thanks Ned. Do you mind if I message you directly? I will get rid of xmbchub. One question I have is how do I modify advance settings.xml on android. I know how to do it on PC.

Thanks for your time
Conrad

Ned. Thanks so much for the advice. I upgraded to Xbmc android rc and used the buffalo velocity external drive and video is smooth as rain!!!!' Thanks so much for your help

Xbmc is playing full HD 30gb files!!