(2020-12-06, 23:23)ADringer Wrote: Sorry for the questions, but having an issue.
So to make use of Kodi on the FireStick I bought a new Asus ac86 router so I could plug in my WD Elements HD into the USB3 port to use as a NAS.
I've bought the ethernet adapter mentioned in the first page and set this all up Friday night. I have it a quick test using Lord Of The Rings 4k and watched it for 15 minutes without any issues.
I've come back this evening to watch something and now it seems like the network speed is pretty much non existent. 4k videos start and then buffer after a few seconds and then buffers for about a minute before continuing. 1080p plays longer before buffering but does still happen.
I've tried rebooting both FireStick and router, and disabled WiFi on the router to make sure nothing else was hogging the network (it was the only thing plugged in) but no luck.
Doing fast.com comes back with 200mbps and I've tried Kodi on my mobile over WiFi and it plays the 4k video fine from the same NAS.
I know this probably could be any number of things, but is there anything that could cause a network speed issue with Kodi/FireStick without any obvious changes?
Thanks
Sorry, can't edit my post yet so posting an update here.
So I've been doing a bit of testing to try and narrow down the issue. Watching the network traffic for the Firestick showed that Kodi was trying to stream the video at something small like 2Mbps which obviously isn't fast enough 4k streams. The Firestick network speed does go a lot higher than this when I did fast.com test or Netflix.
Based on this I thought I'd test out the USB HDD on the router to see if that is the issue. I can run Kodi fine on my laptop streaming via wifi using the USB HDD, so this wasn't the issue.
I have got Plex configured so tried that on the Firestick pointing to the same USB HDD. This played the streams fine. Note that Plex Server reported it as 'Direct Stream' so I guess it was streamed full size?
I then tried Kodi on the Firestick unplugged from the network and used wifi instead. This now worked fine, so by this point thought it must be something to do with the connection.
Plugged the cable back in and is now streaming fine using ethernet, so not sure what the issue was! Is there anything in Kodi that could limit the bandwidth of a hardwired connection? I had previously unplugged the cable to test in my laptop, but hadn't switch to wifi and back again which seems to have kicked it into life.