My KODI streaming experience, with a Netgear R8000

[Roy2001]

I bought a R8000 last year, but I was too lazy to swap my old trusted N16 out until recently. Last week I finally started to use the "new" R8000. Wow.

My house is pretty big, 4900 sqft 2 story. The router was placed at 1st floor, not very close the the center but not far away too. I thought 5Ghz range would be very limited, but actually, I WAS wrong. The range is much better than I expected.

So I set all the devices, ipads, iphones, laptops, streaming devices, to use 5Ghz band whenever possible. I used a Thinkpad Yoga and iphone 6 plus to test the speed. My ISP is comcast 150Mb. I can get 130+ Mb with iphone although I was pretty close to the router. I moved to a room 25 feet away, I still get 100+ Mb. With 2.4Ghz I can only get 30Mb. So 802.11ac really works. In the bedrooom at 2nd floor cornor where signal is weakest, I still can get 60-80Mb which is amazing. But I have to admit, the house floorplan is fairly open, so I don't expect every large house would get the same strong signal.

I put 2 videos on a USB 3.0 drive. One is the life story I ripped off from BD DVD. The other one is a 3.5 hours movie, 25GB file size with 1080p resolution. I put the USB drive to the USB 3.0 port.

I have iphone 6p, 6s, ipad 3, ipad air2, FireTVstick at 2nd floor corner bedroom, FireTV sits a few feet away from the router. All connected to router with 5Ghz band. All devices have Kodi 15.2 version installed.

iphones work flawlessly, even with ripped BD movie, which is about 12GB file for just 50min. Ipad Air2 works as well. The Ipad 3 can stream the 1080p mkv file but not the ripped BD file. The sounds works fine initially, but once the video starts it started to chock, even though I sit next to the router. I test the speed on ipad 3 ant I can get 50-60Mb. So it is not network speed issue. I suspect the hardware decoding does not work for direct blu-ray rip, it should be the format that ipad 3 GPU won't decode.

The interesting part is FireTVstick and FireTV, FTS and FT. FTS is in the bedroom at 2nd floor corner which is weakest point for wifi. It streams all the media files well, even the 12GB 50min BD rip. The FT sits next to the router cannot stream the BD rip file smoothly. I tried different Kodi version and the same result. Finally I found out a LAN cable to connect it to router, and it can stream smoothly without any issue. I am really puzzled. I want to make FT work, but since it is supposed to be next to the router, so I can use LAN to solve the problem.

So, it is a very worthy upgrade for me, from 2.4Ghz N only to an AC3200 router (I believe AC1900 works too). Most devices (iphones, new ipads, streaming devices and laptops) support AC now so it is time if you have not yet. My 2 cents.

PS: attach HDs to router's USB port you have simple NAS solution!

 

[Gryz]

I have an LG dvd-player that can play movies over the network that are on my PC (via CIFS). Works wireless or wired. When I use wireless, I can play 720p movies fine. But with 1080p over wireless I get heavy stuttering. 1080p over cat-5 works great. Wireless just sucks (compared to wired).

Another thing might be buffering with Kodi. The standard buffer-sizes of Kodi are pretty small. That can cause stuttering. Google "kodi increase buffering" or "kodi enlarge buffering" and see how you can change it to a larger value.

 

[Roy2001]

I have an LG dvd-player that can play movies over the network that are on my PC (via CIFS). Works wireless or wired. When I use wireless, I can play 720p movies fine. But with 1080p over wireless I get heavy stuttering. 1080p over cat-5 works great. Wireless just sucks (compared to wired).

Another thing might be buffering with Kodi. The standard buffer-sizes of Kodi are pretty small. That can cause stuttering. Google "kodi increase buffering" or "kodi enlarge buffering" and see how you can change it to a larger value.

When I use N16 router, FireTVstick stuttered. I thought it was buffer issue, but after I increased it I still cannot get it to stream smoothly. Now with the new router, it works great, even with BD rip file (not re-coded mkv). So I am pretty sure it is not buffer size issue on FireTV.

 

[mvbighead]

Interesting stuff here. I will say that I had run some content hardwired to a Raspberry Pi that buffered, and to get that to stop I had to encode differently in Handbrake (Fast setting or something like that).

Beyond that, an el cheapo AC router makes most streams easy. Just had to move the router to the corner of the house as the AC duct work was affecting the signal when I moved it to the office.

Definitely may try that buffering setting though, as occasionally I see some, and I have upped the RAM in both Chromeboxes to 4GB so I have plenty of room to increase the buffer.

 

[sdifox]

Gave up on rpi cuz the SD card is just too slow.

Switched to chromecast.

 

[smitbret]

Interesting stuff here. I will say that I had run some content hardwired to a Raspberry Pi that buffered, and to get that to stop I had to encode differently in Handbrake (Fast setting or something like that).

Yeah, RaspPi Model A and Model B had issues with anything over 30MBps streamed over the network. It didn't matter whether it was streamed wireless or wired Cat5e, they simply lacked the HP to process that much bitrate. I "fixed" it by encoding everything at L4.0 which caps the bitrate at 25Mbps.

I dumped my Model B for a RaspPi 2 and the issue is gone. I can playback direct BD rips without issue now.