I am not a Kodi expert and definitely not an RPi one, but this does seem like a network issue.
Even though you've stated that wiring a Mac on the same cable did not produce any issues, this does not mean that the problem is with the RPi specifically. Well, this might be irrelevant, but just might be related to your own issue. Read on if interested.
There's a thing called IEEE 802.3x flow control. Essentially, this is useful for switches, limiting speed depending on a number of reasons, by sending a number of special ethernet pause frames to limit transfer. This is a rather strange beast to tame, you can read my own story
here (posting as user cosmos).
The bottomline is that I had a media player with a 10/100Mbps adapter, a Netgear NTV550, plugged via a gigabit switch to my home LAN, getting movies etc from a Netgear NAS.
Problem is that the media player had a test to check speed from the NAS. I expected speeds somewhat less than the theoretical limit of 100mbps. Got only ~12!
To make a long story short this seemed to be a specific interop problem of the NAS, the gigabit switch and (possibly) the box as well. To solve, I had to enable IEEE 802.3x flow control on the NAS. Did that, but nothing changed. Thinking that flow control is something negotiated between lan client and switch, I resetted the switch. That did the trick. A new benchmark on the media player showed that performance increased 7x to ~80Mbps.
I am stating this entire story, because other clients on the lan worked just fine. Your story sounds similar. Do the following, if can:
0) Provide the exact switch model you have. I presume it is a gigabit one.
1) I believe Drobo is Linux based? If so, check if IEEE 802.3x flow control is enabled/disabled or set to auto. On other linux boxes the command to use is ethtool (see
http://www.linuxcommand.org/man_pages/ethtool8.html ). Specifically do:
Where ethX is your network interface on the drobo. Try either eth0 or eth1 for example. Not a drobo user so can't really tell. Paste the result
2) Now, I can only presume that the flow control will be disabled. If it's enabled then I'm at a loss at what might be the issue. If flow control is disabled though, then:
2.1) Issue the following command to enable it:
Code:
ethtool -A ethX autoneg on rx on tx on
2.2)
Immediately after issuing the command reset the switch between the RPi and the drobo
2.3) Do your tests and report back if you see any difference during network play
Other things worth investigating:
- Can you try to enable flow control as above but for the RPi2,
before resetting the switch?
- Do experience problems with
all H.264 material? The mediainfo of the file provided referred to LAVf encoding. Had some serious issues decoding LAVf encoded material. Could it be that you are having problems only with them?
