2018-12-28, 00:41
A (late 2014) Mac Mini is the center of my home theater. When using a Netflix add-on to play a video (Land Girls) there is frequent and bothersome buffering (for instance, about 5 minutes in to the first episode). The strange thing is that no buffering interruptions occur when I play the same video on a (mid 2011) Mac Mini.
The two computers are running the same versions of the OS (10.13.6) and Kodi (Leia RC3). An internet speed test shows just over 7 Mbps for both computers.
The first thing I did to solve the problem was to try to increase the video cache for the late 2014 Mini by following directions found here: HOW-TO:Modify_the_video_cache (wiki) The computer has 16GB of RAM, so I figured setting "memorysize" to 1GB should help without causing problems. That seemed to have no effect! When I used Activity Monitor or "top", it looked like Kodi was only using a couple of hundred MB of RAM, and I didn't notice anything else changing memory usage when I killed Kodi. And the video would stop to buffer at the same spot as before. Also, the log seems to indicate that advancedsettings.xml was found and read properly. The log also has multiple lines with "DEBUG: Initialize: using buffer size: 16384 (0.042667 ms)".
Here is the requisite log file: axalijoceg.kodi (paste)
For both computers I verified (keyboard "o") that the video was playing full screen at 1080p. On the "late 2014" computer, "vq" (keyboard Ctrl+shift+o) drops to 0% when the buffering pause occurs. On the "mid 2011" computer, "vq" drops to about 75% at the same spot with no buffering pause.
So what could be causing the difference in performance between the two computers and what can I do to fix the buffering problem?
dgktkr
The two computers are running the same versions of the OS (10.13.6) and Kodi (Leia RC3). An internet speed test shows just over 7 Mbps for both computers.
The first thing I did to solve the problem was to try to increase the video cache for the late 2014 Mini by following directions found here: HOW-TO:Modify_the_video_cache (wiki) The computer has 16GB of RAM, so I figured setting "memorysize" to 1GB should help without causing problems. That seemed to have no effect! When I used Activity Monitor or "top", it looked like Kodi was only using a couple of hundred MB of RAM, and I didn't notice anything else changing memory usage when I killed Kodi. And the video would stop to buffer at the same spot as before. Also, the log seems to indicate that advancedsettings.xml was found and read properly. The log also has multiple lines with "DEBUG: Initialize: using buffer size: 16384 (0.042667 ms)".
Here is the requisite log file: axalijoceg.kodi (paste)
For both computers I verified (keyboard "o") that the video was playing full screen at 1080p. On the "late 2014" computer, "vq" (keyboard Ctrl+shift+o) drops to 0% when the buffering pause occurs. On the "mid 2011" computer, "vq" drops to about 75% at the same spot with no buffering pause.
So what could be causing the difference in performance between the two computers and what can I do to fix the buffering problem?
dgktkr
