[kwyjibo87]

Hi,

I originally had a setup of a WDTV Live streaming (WDBHG70000NBK) attached to a 1 TB external HDD to view local content. I recently purchased an Amazon FireTV stick and side-loaded Kodi 14.2 onto it. Right now, I am sharing my WDTV Live media over my network using smb to play data on the Kodi device, but I'm aware of the downside of this, namely that smb protocol is relatively slower than other, potentially faster streaming protocols.

So, my question is - what is the best (fastest) way to share my media library from my WDTV Live to my Kodi library on the Amazon stick? DLNA? NFS? Do I have to use the WDLXTV custom firmware to get the best performance out of this setup?

Thanks!

[Ned Scott]

Is it actually slow for you? I normally just use SMB to my Fire TV sticks and it hasn't been an issue. The data rate only has to go as fast as needed for playback.

[Tinwarble]

SMB should be fine. The bottleneck is going to be your WDTV SMP anyway since it is not meant to be a NAS. It really doesn't matter what protocol you use because of the weak processor in the SMP.

That being said though, I've streamed full BD's from my HUB and SMP and never had any issues using SMB. But if you want trouble free streaming, I'd suggest getting an actual NAS.

[kwyjibo87]

Thanks for the replies! Generally it works well, but there are occasional hiccups, and since the stick is wifi only, I thought that a faster sharing protocol might alleviate some issues. But it seems, as you are saying, that the bottleneck is unlikely to be the connection itself, so I shouldn't bother trying to improve it.