Kodi Community Forum

Hi all,

My media\network setup is served from a media PC, connected to a gigabit switch, as is all my devices. Two weeks ago, playing any film, large DTS mkvs etc played fine, with no buffering or pauses through my Pi. Last week playing any file started to just pause randomly. I bought a new Pi2 for another room, but figured I'd replace the 'pausing' Pi with the new one. Not only do I have the same issue, but playing the same media, on the old Pi, but in a different room, plays fine. So I can only assume its something to do with the Powerline WiFi adapters?

Any thoughts would be well received, as I'm stuck as to why I now have an issue streaming.

EDIT: Just went down to test, and the same movie played fine with zero pauses. So I'm still stuck as to why its pausing.The powerline utility claims the connected Powerline adapater (to the Pi) is 177mbps, so that's not the issue.

Power-lines are pain in the ass devices. They are lightly influenced by other power adapters which makes 'noise' in the power line and affect network transfer. Try to find out if you have add any new devices from the last time it was playing ok.

I was using powerlines too (TP-Link and Belkin), and they caused nothing but grief. You'll find that the age of the house wiring and if the two outlets are on the same phase or not has a huge impact on performance.

I went back to using WiFi and just changed my cache settings instead. The video takes a few seconds to start playing, but all my pausing issues are gone now.

http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Modify_the_video_cache

You don't mention what version of Powerline adaptors you're using? Quoted speeds by the utilities normally cheat by summing up the speed in each direction and then it's raw speed with all the overheads included so the actual payload that's usable is then much less again. So that 177mbps will actually be 88.5mbps in any one direction, so I'd expect usable bandwidth in the order of 40-50mpbs, to get an accurate picture of bandwidth then use the File Manager to transfer a file between devices and time how long it takes.

I have 3 Devolo AV 200 Minis and a pair of On Networks 500s on my network and I can get 50 - 60 Mbps transferring files between machines. They have been faultless performers.