Kodi Community Forum

Right now I have a FireTV Stick Gen 2 running Kodi 18.1 Android.

I have the stick using both 5GHZ and 2.4GHZ WiFi-N and same symptoms.

Basically I had to change PCs and reinstall Vista on my file server PC that has my FLV/MP4 files.

On the old PC that was virtually a clone of the current PC, the same Kodi on the same stick had no issues.

Yet now when I play files from the PC on the stick, it randomly after like 2 minutes, freezes the video and the log says "Connection Timed Out" for the SMB connection.

The stick does not do this when I play similar videos from my Ubuntu 18.04 Samba.

Also strangely the Ubuntu's Kodi 18.1 also does not do this behavior playing files from the Vista PC.

I tried changing some typical Regedit settings like TTL and Buffer Size in LanmanServer yet still the same behavior.

I can't seem to figure out what would cause the stick to have issues with Vista, yet the same Kodi version on Ubuntu works fine for the same files.

Just in case anyone finds this thread with similar issues, the following page appears to have fixed my issue.

SMB Settings Registry

I took the advice about halfway down the page that states what Microsoft recommended for a Win 2000 Terminal Server.

It seems those settings helped other issues like when the Vista PC likes to randy refuse Kodi.

My Vista PC is shared amongst my various PCs and it seems the default settings weren't keeping up as at times Ubuntu CIFS Mounts would also timeout.

Well those settings were mostly good but now it's still acting up.

Sometimes it takes a freezes for about 25 seconds then plays more skipping ahead like it's trying to catxh up video with the audio.

This could be an issue with Vista.  While you may only be using it for file serving, you really should switch to a different OS.  Vista hasn't been patched for over 2 years now and is a serious liability.

Generally I'd recommend running Windows server for any scenario.  It tends to give less issues.  I've found little difference between Server 2016 and 2019 though, both work well for file serving.

I think that I found the issue by accident.

For an unrelated issue, I was examining my networking equipment.

Upon doing so, jiggiling cables, I noticed this issue oddly severely intensified. Oddly speed testing on a WiFi Device at first appeared to help cause it.

So after checking the networking cable again, even though the cat 6 clip wasn't broken off, it just pulled right out from the PC and appeared already out partially. I tried pulling the clip out slightly but it just broke off and I replaced the cable.

So far so good.

Actually I amend my solution above.

It turns out even though the bad cable didn't help, it appears it was actually a bad/failing gigabit switch.

I took the switch out after I noticed that if you connect via my AP also in the same switch and do a wifi speed test, the problem immediately occurred.

After replacement of the switch, a speed test did not cause the same issues.

I guess what was occurring was the switch for some reason or another wasn't keeping up if multiple clients on it where communicating.