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I'm hoping someone can answer this question about WebDAV. My goal is to ultimately be able to stream by movie collection stored on my synology NAS from my house to my parents house. I should mention that my movies are uncompressed bluray rips so are very large. 20-30 gigs each. Obviously this will take a very fast internet connection. They have 18 mbps up and 18 down at their house but will be moving to 100/100 in a couple of weeks. I have 11 up and 50 down at my house. I have successfully gotten Kodi set up at their house and able to access my library via webdav, however the buffering is too much to watch one of the large files. However, when I access my library via webdav at my house through Kodi, they movies stream without an issue. This does not make sense to me as I should be limited by the same upload speed, unless webdav somehow streams the movies through my network instead of through the internet. I have unable to find any information on how webdav works if both the source and receiver are both on the same network. Any ideas? Thanks.
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helta
Posting Freak
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How far away is their house? I'm betting you would have better luck running over there with an external harddrive then trying to do what you are doing. You may want to look into Plex.
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Haha yeah thats always an option, but I really wanted to get this to work. I'm guessing that my upload speed is the limiting factor, but I just thought it was interesting that it worked flawlessly when I tried it at my own house. I just wanted to confirm from someone that webdav does not access my NAS through the internet when running Kodi on the same network as the Synology.
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Take what I say with a grain of salt: I was where you are now. I tried everything I could think of to remotely stream content to Kodi/XBMC...short answer? Kodi is a media player, which means it has no built-in transcoding mechanism. It simply plays back media files it has access to. Unless you can provide a connection with a sustained thruoutput, you will not attain smooth playback. I remember having issues on my home network with a 500Mbps powerline setup. Uncompressed Bluray would required upto 43MB/S. Unless you have a fiber link or live in South Korea, you cannot expect that kind of bandwith with a home connection. You need a media streaming server to accomodate remote users.
Do yourself a favour and install Media Browser 3 (if you don't like PLEX). MB3 even has a Kodi Add-on...
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Thanks for the response. I am unfamiliar with MB3. How would this help to fix my problem? My other question is what about changing the cache to 0 so that the movie can load some before playing it. Would that potentially make it so that I can stream the movies. Just to update, the upload connection being used is 15 mbps and the download is 100 mbps (fiber). Thanks.
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Setting the cache to 0 won't prevent buffering. It might smooth out the number of times the video stops to buffer, but the speed that the video is loading at will remain the same.
You've got a fast connection, but check that against the bitrate of one of the videos giving you issues. You can use something like
mediainfo (wiki) to find that out.
Also, sometimes internet providers like to fib on the speeds by telling you what your "burst" speed is. They'll give you a moment of really fast speeds, but a sustained connection will then get throttled back. There are some speed test sites out there that attempt to find out your real speed in these situations, so that might be something to look at too. Although I would be surprised if they did that on such a high teir of service like yours, but it doesn't hurt to check.
There could also be some issue where Kodi only thinks it needs to buffer, but is actually getting enough speed. I've heard of that happening before, but I'm not sure how to troubleshoot for that.
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I know that changing the cache doesn't speed up the connection but I figured I could play the video and pause it to allow it to load for a little bit before playing the file. Is that a correct assumption or am I misunderstanding what changing the cache to 0 does? Thanks
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Am I wrong in thinking that the video would load if paused at the beginning when changing the cache to 0?
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That is what the Cache does, yes.
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Great, so that would potentially be a solution for my problem. The movies run at about 3 MB/s and I can get about 1.8 MB/s upload on my connection. Wish I lived in their neighborhood with the fiber optic connection at 100 mbps/100 mbps. And its cheaper than my 75/15 connection.
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@
ngordonmd,
Let Kodi/XBMC does what it does best: Playback media files within the context of the 1Gbps LAN. Trying to play remote files natively with Kodi is like trying to put a square peg into a round hole...
Pairing Kodi with something like MB3 will give you the best of both worlds: Enjoy DTS-HD, 1080i resolution while at home (within the LAN), while streaming to mobile/remote devices, with unreliable, low speed broadband connection with a streaming server.
Remember: A streaming server will transcode the source media to adapt it to your connection and bandwith, making for smooth (albeit lower resolution) playback.
But in the end, the choice is yours...
