I have the latest Kodi 15 installed on a Fire TV stick and it plays the videos just fine. I am streaming content from an HD attached to my router. But when playing music files, it is stuttering. I can't figure out why the hardware and network is good for video (higher bandwidth) but chokes on music (mp3).
I have tried to turn on the passthrough to my receiver and that did not make a difference. I have disabled the visualization since it might be causing some processor waste.
Any other ideas for me to try?
Thanks.
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PS: The set up is awesome and the sound quality is stupendous, so thanks to the developers.
I am having a similar problem but video related. The video stutters and I have no audio at all. The only fix for this I've noticed is to "downgrade" (if you even want to call it that) to 14.2
I'd be interested to hear your findings if you have the same problem with Helix. Let us know!
While trying to downgrade to 14.2 I noticed that there is a 15.1 upgrade available. I was on 15.0. Upgrading to 15.1 seems to have fixed some choppiness. But I am yet to play a few songs to be positively sure.
Meanwhile, for your video issues, this blog mentions two possible fixes.
http://www.tweaking4all.com/home-theatre...on-fire-tv
Has anyone had any progress with stuttering? I've been so busy tweaking my setup and testing videos (even 1080p with DTS-HD MA encoded on them (12+GB) play just fine here as do all videos, it seems), but other than some DTS audio testing, I hadn't really tried music out other than a brief test to make sure things worked and endless frustration over trying to get ProjectM to work without Kodi quitting/exiting. Well, therein lies the problem. I hadn't really played full songs. I've found that I get "stutters" after awhile (sometimes right away, but often after a couple of minutes) and sometimes it's momentary and other times it seems to get worse. I finally seemed to get ProjectM working after a total reinstall, but it seems to trigger the stuttering much sooner and once it starts stuttering, Kodi then quits and audio stops again.
So it seems like there's a CPU issue going on in that running another program (i.e. ProjectM for Android) makes it worse, even to the point of Kodi crashing. I did notice that FireTV apparently only outputs 48kHz (make DTS Music CDs impossible to play without transcoding) and there's a setting in the system/audio to control "quality" for resampling. It defaults to medium. I did notice that "high" seemed to make it worse. So I tried LOW (fast) and it does seem to help. I get far less stutters now (I won't say it's 100% gone; I haven't tested enough yet), but ProjectM still brings the problem out regardless. I also disabled RSS message scrolling and the visualizer (it sucks royally anyway, which is why I was trying so hard to get ProjectM working with it). I also tried playing photo slideshows instead and even they could cause stuttering. It's like Kodi doesn't want anything going on in the background or anywhere else (you can't control what Amazon's own GUI is doing in the background either).
Oddly, video has no issues at all. Everything plays fine. I think that's because it uses hardware decoding. I can only assume there is no hardware audio only decoding or something is amiss if there is. I know on my old Gen1 AppleTV running XBMC Eden, Paplayer would stutter like made, but DVDPlayer was perfectly fine so I set it to use DVDPlayer. Here, though it seems to make no difference or if anything, DVDPlayer might even do a bit worse (especially when trying to get ProjectM going; it fails almost instantly whereas PAPlayer has played for several minutes with it running before eventually stuttering audio). One problem with ProjectM being sideloaded is that it seems to be for Android phones and tablets and when I try to activate its settings menu to turn down the resolution or speed, it just crashes/exits so it's stuck on default which seems to be pretty high on the settings list (high resolution and fast/smooth movements so maybe that's why it interferes with music so much if it's hogging CPU time over the audio player, but that still doesn't fully explain why I still get occasional audio stutters with nothing else going on and no visualizers. I even disabled FireTV's own screensaver. No help.
I just find it kind of ridiculous that 1080p files with DTS-HD MA that are over 12GB in size can stream with nary an issue over WiFi to this thing, but a simple AAC or MP3 file makes it choke. My 2008 AppleTV can only handle low-rate 720P without a Broadcom card added, but it's never had any issues playing music from the Apple interface or from XBMC using DVDPlayer and its hardware is ancient by today's standards. It's disappointing because this means I have to keep a second device around just for music in which case I find myself wondering if I shouldn't have just bought some other device to begin with. The problem is they all seem to have compromises (i.e. no Amazon player yet on the new AppleTV and only a chopped up version of Kodi called MrMC that still has the Apple-based SMB type issues many have had with Kodi, etc. Oddly I have had no SMB issues using Apple's own SMB, just problems setting it up using ZeroConf, but once the main drive is manually added as a source, I can set up all the shares I want up fairly quickly.
Maybe I should have got the 4k FireTV (mark 2) no because I need 4k, but because it has a lot more CPU power to it plus Ethernet and a USB port.
One note on WiFi. I did notice I had a poor signal on my downstairs home theater and only a good signal on my upstairs high-end audio (plus 48" plasma mounted above my piano between the two 6' ribbons speakers). I did a lot of channel testing on my Netgear WNDR3700 router and finally found a good channel and now get Very Good/Good (strength/channel quality) on the upstairs system and Good/Good on the home theater. I originally figured that was probably the cause of the stuttering, but I guess not since the audio still stutters.
I tried 16 Beta 3 and Beta 4 out as well and it was very poor here. Videos took forever to start for some reason (lord of the rings extended said "working" for like 3 minutes before it started playing whereas in 15.2 Isengard, it started in about 3 seconds. And while 16 beta 3/4 would correctly detect DTS-HD MA as 7.1 during a library scan, it would still only show "5.1" in the OSD and worse yet, DTS-ES 6.1 that used to display correctly in 15.2 showed up as "DTS Stereo" in the audio selection menu and "5.1" in the OSD display (and 6.1 in the menu selection area). Because the player itself thought it was only stereo, it would pick Dolby Digital 5.1 over DTS-ES 6.1 by default and that did not happen in 15.2 so in my opinion, they made it worse. The fact that the channel numbers show up differently in 2 or even 3 different places (audio selection, on-screen display while playing and the menu media info display) makes it all the stranger. 15.2 Isengard wouldn't show 7.1 (it would say 5.1) but 6.1 showed correctly in all three places and was always selected as the "best" soundtrack. 16 picks dolby digital instead as I said.
Given the lack of 44.1kHz output and stutter issues with audio, I'm thinking I may be better off just setting my old Gen1 AppleTVs with OpenElec and a Broadcom card (I already have the cards here, waiting to be installed). I'd still need a 2nd device to watch Netflix, etc., but from what I've read, Kodi runs quite nicely on it with that card installed. FireTV's Netflix player sucks anyway (it seems to skip frames every so often whereas AppleTV's Netflix player is smooth) so maybe Old AppleTV running OpenElec and a Gen3 AppleTV running Netflix, etc. That still wouldn't get me Amazon Prime videos, though (3 players for optimum playback? That's getting ridiculous. There's clearly a market for an actual GOOD media player! In fact, that player might just be a home theater PC. That should run everything fine.
*cough* Nvidia ShieldTV
Best device ever so far from my perspective. Once HD Audio pass through is working in the next version or 2 it will be great!
If there are serious issues, please open a bug ticket with the appropriate logs and hopefully devs can help:
http://trac.kodi.tv/
Cheers!