2015-01-13, 08:04
Over the past months I've encountered some networking problems that I've been able to solve.
I'd like to share the solution with the community as I haven't found these fixes anywhere else before.
My basic setup is Kodi on a Win7 laptop, hooked up to a wifi network connected to broadband internet.
# problem 1: playing local videos (on the hard disk of the Kodi pc) goes well, but any networked video (either local wifi from a different pc or an internet stream) takes 30+ seconds to start.
Once the networked video starts playing, the flow is good, no hiccups or buffering.
This turned out to be a firewall problem. My Avast internet security apparently ran its own firewall, next to the Windows firewall which I had switched off. After an update of the Avast software it forgot that the wifi network I connect to had been marked "private" and "friends", so it started blocking port by default and only whitelisting specific programs.
The solution was very simple: after marking my wifi network as "private" and "friends" there were no delays in the starting of videos anymore.
# problem 2: one specific online video add-on stopped working and only reported "Script caused an error" messages.
This turned out to be a corruption of the add-on specific cookie file, located at:
C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\userdata\addon_data\plugin.video.[add-on name]\cookies.lwp
Easy fix is here to clear the file of any data, so any corrupted lines won't choke the cookies library into throwing a fatal exception.
Another solution is to carefully check each line for syntax errors and repair them manually, but that's very time and labor intensive.
# problem 3: thumbnails for online video add-ons load very slowly and only in small chunks, and online video starts playing after a considerable delay (5 - 10 secs) and the same delays is there everytime the video is skipped or fast forward or backwarded. Local videos and locally networked videos don't show any of these problems.
The problem in this case is again with corrupted cookies, only this time it is the general cookie file in the cache that is broken, so all online video add-ons are now affected together.
C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\cache\cookies.txt
Apparently the system tries to save the cookies is receives while getting thumbnails and video data online, but there is a delay / timeout until it decides the cookies can not be saved and it resumes normal operation.
Simple fix is here again to delete the contents of the file, or to simply delete all contents of the cahce directory.
Hope this helps some of your problems too.
Good luck!
I'd like to share the solution with the community as I haven't found these fixes anywhere else before.
My basic setup is Kodi on a Win7 laptop, hooked up to a wifi network connected to broadband internet.
# problem 1: playing local videos (on the hard disk of the Kodi pc) goes well, but any networked video (either local wifi from a different pc or an internet stream) takes 30+ seconds to start.
Once the networked video starts playing, the flow is good, no hiccups or buffering.
This turned out to be a firewall problem. My Avast internet security apparently ran its own firewall, next to the Windows firewall which I had switched off. After an update of the Avast software it forgot that the wifi network I connect to had been marked "private" and "friends", so it started blocking port by default and only whitelisting specific programs.
The solution was very simple: after marking my wifi network as "private" and "friends" there were no delays in the starting of videos anymore.
# problem 2: one specific online video add-on stopped working and only reported "Script caused an error" messages.
This turned out to be a corruption of the add-on specific cookie file, located at:
C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\userdata\addon_data\plugin.video.[add-on name]\cookies.lwp
Easy fix is here to clear the file of any data, so any corrupted lines won't choke the cookies library into throwing a fatal exception.
Another solution is to carefully check each line for syntax errors and repair them manually, but that's very time and labor intensive.
# problem 3: thumbnails for online video add-ons load very slowly and only in small chunks, and online video starts playing after a considerable delay (5 - 10 secs) and the same delays is there everytime the video is skipped or fast forward or backwarded. Local videos and locally networked videos don't show any of these problems.
The problem in this case is again with corrupted cookies, only this time it is the general cookie file in the cache that is broken, so all online video add-ons are now affected together.
C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\cache\cookies.txt
Apparently the system tries to save the cookies is receives while getting thumbnails and video data online, but there is a delay / timeout until it decides the cookies can not be saved and it resumes normal operation.
Simple fix is here again to delete the contents of the file, or to simply delete all contents of the cahce directory.
Hope this helps some of your problems too.
Good luck!