Kodi Community Forum

Hi everyone,
I'm facing some difficulty troubleshooting the cause of my recent woes. The hardware hasn't changed (AMD Phenom II X4 955 Processor, 8gig ram, GT430 GPU) but I have upgraded to Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr and to XBMC Gotham final. What used to work flawlessly with Ubuntu 13.10 and XBMC 12.3 is giving me much of a headache. Now, let me explain the title of my thread. That PC running XBMC also serves as a samba server sharing films on locally connected USB hard drives, which makes it easy to have another computer in the house share the mysql db hosted by the first computer.
The problem appears when I play a film with a rather high bitrate (ie. bluray remix) on the main PC. According to the OSD, XBMC keeps buffering every 4, 5, 10 minutes when played from the smb share whereas it plays flawlessly when started from the local USB hard drive. No amount of editing advancedsettings.xml with the buffermode tag helped at all.
So, where should I look? Is it a problem with samba since upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04? Is it XBMC Gotham using a new mechanism when playing from a samba share? I'm at a loss...
Any help would be much appreciated.
TIA

Did I overlook the Debug Log ?

OK. Here you go.
First debug log: playing movie Elysium from local USB HDD added to sources.xml as an smb share.
Second debug log: playing same movie from local USB HDD.
In both instances I played the first 6 minutes of the film, approximately, and when using the smb share XBMC buffered three times. Played from HDD as /media/<usb drive>/ viewing was as smooth as silk. Hope you can help me understand.
PS: I edited out the <network></network> section from advancedsettings.xml to see if it was useful but nope, it didn't change a thing.