[TheSwede86]

Hello,

I am having problems with buffering on a 4K video playing on my TV - Philips 65OLED854 running Kodi through Android TV playing from my NAS (more info below).

The build reported by Kodi is "Kodi 18.5 Git:20191116-37f51f6e63" running on Android 9.0.0 API level 28 (kernel: Linux 4.9.125).

I thought my NAS-device where the media resides on could be the bottleneck (Intel Celeron J1800 dual-core @ 2.4 GHz w. 8GB of RAM) but I can see during playback that the NAS reports around 12% CPU and 17% RAM-utilization during playback.

When looking at "Player process info" (when pressing "O" during playback) it reports "System memory usage" as around 75% which is steady even just before it starts to buffer. However when activating the debug option I see that all cores on my TV are shown with 0% utilization but "Kodi-CPU" is around 130% and then goes to 60-70% after the buffering issue has occured.

The connection to my TV where Kodi is running is through ethernet (Cat6) and my NAS is also connected through ethernet (Cat6) through a gigabit-compatible router so its gigabit all the way.
The NAS reports around 10-11MBps network utilization which is around 80Mbit and a far cry from what the network infrastructure can provide.

Appreciate your time and help - TheSwede86

[Klojum]

The build reported by Kodi is "Kodi 18.5 Git:20191116-37f51f6e63" running on Android 9.0.0 API level 28 (kernel: Linux 4.9.125).

There is a newer Kodi version for Android for some time now. Please first upgrade.

The connection to my TV where Kodi is running is through ethernet (Cat6) and my NAS is also connected through ethernet (Cat6) through a gigabit-compatible router so its gigabit all the way.
The NAS reports around 10-11MBps network utilization which is around 80Mbit and a far cry from what the network infrastructure can provide.

Philips are not known for having very powerful and speedy hardware in their TV sets.
10-11 MBps sounds like a 100Mbit connection.

[TheSwede86]

The build reported by Kodi is "Kodi 18.5 Git:20191116-37f51f6e63" running on Android 9.0.0 API level 28 (kernel: Linux 4.9.125).

There is a newer Kodi version for Android for some time now. Please first upgrade.

The connection to my TV where Kodi is running is through ethernet (Cat6) and my NAS is also connected through ethernet (Cat6) through a gigabit-compatible router so its gigabit all the way.
The NAS reports around 10-11MBps network utilization which is around 80Mbit and a far cry from what the network infrastructure can provide.

Philips are not known for having very powerful and speedy hardware in their TV sets.
10-11 MBps sounds like a 100Mbit connection.   

Thank you for your reply.

Sorry for the old info:
Build: Kodi 18.6 Git: 20200229-8e967df921
Compiled: 2020-02-29

I'll try tomorrow using iperf between my TV (using Termux) and my NAS and report back

Update 2020-04-05:

The movie I am trying to stream has (according to VLC, Tools > Media Information > Statistics) a content bitrate of around 90349kb/s and my iPerf results between the TV and my NAS are:
Server = NAS
Client = TV
Figures taken from TV
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate Retr
[ 5] 0.00-10.00 sec 112 MBytes 11496 KBytes/sec 0 sender
[ 5] 0.00-10.04 sec 112 MBytes 11415 KBytes/sec receiver

So unless I'm off here:
90349kbps ~ 11293KBps so the TV's NIC can barely fetch data fast enough through the network from the NAS and that explains the buffering?

[kalima]

hello @TheSwede86 ,

i have the same issue with 65OLED804. Philips use 100mbit connection. We can't have usb to gigabit port adaptor

I use htpc for the moment. I will switch to Nvidia Shield. I don't found fix for the issue.

[TheSwede86]

hello @TheSwede86 ,

i have the same issue with 65OLED804. Philips use 100mbit connection. We can't have usb to gigabit port adaptor

I use htpc for the moment. I will switch to Nvidia Shield. I don't found fix for the issue.

Hi!

Yeah I tried with WiFi instead and I got these figures;
Server = NAS
Client = TV
Figures taken from TV
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate Retr
[ 5] 0.00-10.00 sec 197 MBytes 20203 KBytes/sec sender
[ 5] 0.00-10.04 sec 197 MBytes 20116 KBytes/sec receiver

So around 40-50% better performance using WiFi then ethernet (my router is an 802.11ac 2x2 MIMO w. 1734Mbps on the 5GHz band).
I also tried using a "USB to Gigabit Ethernet"-adapter (USB 3.0) and tried both the USB 2.0 and 3.0 port on the TV but nothing...
The chipset inside the adapter I tried was "ASIX AX88179" which seems to have been supported since kernel 3.9 and the TV has kernel 4.9.125.

I still get buffering issues though even using WiFi which is around 40-50% better then their sh*tty ethernet which is sad