[robca]

I have set up a system with an HDHomeRun tuner, a Chromebox as the main Kodi box in my media room, and a RPi3 as a secondary Kodi box in my kitchen (both running OpenElec 17 beta). The HDHomeRun tuner, Chromebox and RPi3 are all connected with a Gigabit switch, on an otherwise mostly unused home network.The Chromebox has a small 32G USB3 stick I use to store recorded programs (yes, too small for real use, but I'm still testing, and 32G is enough to record a few programs). The Chromebox is acting as the tvheadend server, and the RPi3 is using the tvheadend client (so are a couple of Windows PC I'm testing with)

I can watch TV just fine both from the Chromebox and RPi3, including HD programs. I can watch TV from any of my Windows PCs running Kodi for Windows, too. When I record an HD program, I can watch it without problems from the Chromebox. But if I try to watch it remotely (RPi3 or a Windows PC), the video is choppy and the audio starts choppy, then disappear. I can watch SD programs without problems

What am I doing wrong? Clearly the network is fast enough to watch a stream directly from the HDHomeRun. But once that same stream is recorded, it looks as if the network (or the Chromebox) is too slow to handle the stream... how can I start troubleshooting the problem?

Are you in the US?

Have you bought the £2.40 MPEG2 codec licence and installed it correctly on your Pi 3? The Pi 2 and Pi 3 can software decode SD MPEG2 (The Pi 1 and Zero can't) but you really need the licence for 1080i or 720p HD stuff, particularly HD 1080i as deinterlacing and software decode is too much for even a Pi 3.

Thanks for your suggestion. Indeed I will need to buy the MPEG2 decoder for my RPi3, luckily it's cheap

Actually I had 2 unrelated problems, in addition to the missing MPEG2:

• All of my Windows computers (with more than enough graphic horsepower) were choppy. I was using a USB3 stick formatted with ExFAT. I'm now using a 2.5" SATA HDD with a USB3-to-SATA converter, and I formatted the HDD with ext4. The drive is clearly slower than the USB stick, but very likely ext4 performs much better on Linux. I might have had some other problems on my USB stick, but now that I'm using ext4 and the new HDD, Windows PC can play back anything at 1080p, no problems
  
• On the RPi3 I had both wired and wireless network enabled. Somehow the RPi3 must have used WiFi instead of wired, and it was choppy even playing back 720p videos (I have poor WiFi signal where my RPi3 is). Once I disabled WiFi, the RPI3 can play 720p fine, and play "almost"1080p (you can see that a few frames are skipped, but it's not as choppy as before). Getting the MPEG2 license will solve this, I'm sure
  

Bottom line: when using external HDD/USB sticks, the format you use might make a big difference

thanks for the help