[VonMagnum]

So I set it to SMB1 through SMB3 (hey, let it pick) and adjusted the advancedsettings.xml to buffer everything, set the buffer to 300MB with a read ahead factor of 10.  I actually made it through a movie (2 hours 20 minutes "Color of Night" with Bruce Willis) without it exiting!  It did freeze once with the buffer set to 150MB and a normal read factor.  I'll see what it does with the next movie.

[Pirivan]

So I set it to SMB1 through SMB3 (hey, let it pick) and adjusted the advancedsettings.xml to buffer everything, set the buffer to 300MB with a read ahead factor of 10.  I actually made it through a movie (2 hours 20 minutes "Color of Night" with Bruce Willis) without it exiting!  It did freeze once with the buffer set to 150MB and a normal read factor.  I'll see what it does with the next movie.

That's promising!  If it continues to work for you, please share the contents of your advancedsettings.xml; I would be interested to test that as well.

[VonMagnum]

So I set it to SMB1 through SMB3 (hey, let it pick) and adjusted the advancedsettings.xml to buffer everything, set the buffer to 300MB with a read ahead factor of 10.  I actually made it through a movie (2 hours 20 minutes "Color of Night" with Bruce Willis) without it exiting!  It did freeze once with the buffer set to 150MB and a normal read factor.  I'll see what it does with the next movie.

That's promising!  If it continues to work for you, please share the contents of your advancedsettings.xml; I would be interested to test that as well. 

This is what I'm using right now if you want to try it in advancedsettings.xml:

<advancedsettings>
  <network>
     <buffermode>1</buffermode>
     <cachemembuffersize>3002428800</cachemembuffersize>
     <readfactor>10</readfactor>
  </network>
</advancedsettings>

[Pirivan]

So I set it to SMB1 through SMB3 (hey, let it pick) and adjusted the advancedsettings.xml to buffer everything, set the buffer to 300MB with a read ahead factor of 10.  I actually made it through a movie (2 hours 20 minutes "Color of Night" with Bruce Willis) without it exiting!  It did freeze once with the buffer set to 150MB and a normal read factor.  I'll see what it does with the next movie.

That's promising!  If it continues to work for you, please share the contents of your advancedsettings.xml; I would be interested to test that as well.     

This is what I'm using right now if you want to try it in advancedsettings.xml:

<advancedsettings>
  <network>
     <buffermode>1</buffermode>
     <cachemembuffersize>3002428800</cachemembuffersize>
     <readfactor>10</readfactor>
  </network>
</advancedsettings>    

Are you using an older version of Kodi?  Shouldn't it be formatted like the wiki article (https://kodi.wiki/view/Advancedsettings.xml)?  I may try it like this:

 3002428800 1 10 :


<advancedsettings version="1.0">

  <cache>

     <memorysize>3002428800</memorysize>

     <buffermode>1</buffermode>

     <readfactor>10</readfactor>

  </cache>

</advancedsettings>

[VonMagnum]

That's promising!  If it continues to work for you, please share the contents of your advancedsettings.xml; I would be interested to test that as well.     

This is what I'm using right now if you want to try it in advancedsettings.xml:

<advancedsettings>
  <network>
     <buffermode>1</buffermode>
     <cachemembuffersize>3002428800</cachemembuffersize>
     <readfactor>10</readfactor>
  </network>
</advancedsettings>     

Are you using an older version of Kodi?  Shouldn't it be formatted like the wiki article (https://kodi.wiki/view/Advancedsettings.xml)?  I may try it like this:

 3002428800 1 10 :


<advancedsettings version="1.0">

  <cache>

     <memorysize>3002428800</memorysize>

     <buffermode>1</buffermode>

     <readfactor>10</readfactor>

  </cache>

</advancedsettings>

 

Yeah, I have no idea why the network tag is there.  I've just had a copy in my backup directory I copy to the devices.  Maybe that's why it never worked very well for me in the past. 

[Pirivan]

It's possible Kodi wasn't 'accepting' my advancedsettings.xml but I still had playback halting issues with both your version and what I posted (with my SMB settings set to SMBv1-SMBv3).  I rebooted/shut off the Shield as well and that did not appear to make a difference.  Hopefully it is still working for you though.

[VonMagnum]

I just got the 8.0.2 update for the Shield.  I don't know if it fixes anything or not. I haven't had time lately to watch many movies and some new purchases have been on iTunes so no KODI there.

[VonMagnum]

I updated to 8.0.2.  I started John Wick 2 in Atmos with 18.5 Leia and it "stopped" within 3 minutes of the movie starting.  I shut down all other Apps on the Shield and ran KODI again and started the movie again.  It made it almost to the 2 hour point (literally 10 seconds until the credits rolled and then "stopped" again.)  Could there be a memory connection somewhere?  I don't think my FireTV 4K 2nd Gen has all that much memory and it never "stops".  But then I did greatly increase the cache so maybe the other programs were sucking up some needed memory.  It certainly changed the previous pattern of stopping about every 30-60 minutes.  That's two movies now where one made it through and the other went almost 2 hours.  One thing is certain.  The Shield update did nothing to fix the problem.

I've changed settings to only allow SMB1 to SMB2.  I'll see if that has any effect the next movie.  I keep wondering if it's possible my WiFi connection simply isn't as good as on the FireTV given it's a full floor below that room and about as far from the router as possible in the house on that side at least.  But the Shield always seems to say "Excellent" on the signal meter, but that doesn't mean there couldn't be a momentary hiccup.  I might drop the cache setting a little bit in case I went too far.

[Pirivan]

I updated to 8.0.2.  I started John Wick 2 in Atmos with 18.5 Leia and it "stopped" within 3 minutes of the movie starting.  I shut down all other Apps on the Shield and ran KODI again and started the movie again.  It made it almost to the 2 hour point (literally 10 seconds until the credits rolled and then "stopped" again.)  Could there be a memory connection somewhere?  I don't think my FireTV 4K 2nd Gen has all that much memory and it never "stops".  But then I did greatly increase the cache so maybe the other programs were sucking up some needed memory.  It certainly changed the previous pattern of stopping about every 30-60 minutes.  That's two movies now where one made it through and the other went almost 2 hours.  One thing is certain.  The Shield update did nothing to fix the problem.

I've changed settings to only allow SMB1 to SMB2.  I'll see if that has any effect the next movie.  I keep wondering if it's possible my WiFi connection simply isn't as good as on the FireTV given it's a full floor below that room and about as far from the router as possible in the house on that side at least.  But the Shield always seems to say "Excellent" on the signal meter, but that doesn't mean there couldn't be a momentary hiccup.  I might drop the cache setting a little bit in case I went too far.

This sounds similar to the experience I am having with the modified cache settings.  On some normal, 1080p 30-60 TV shows it tends to no longer quit/exit.  However, in longer 4K movies, it will quit at some point (10, 30, 60 minutes in) every time still.  Not yet decided on longer 1080P content, I would need to test a bit more to see if that is 'improved' with the modified cache settings.  8.0.2 also appeared to have 0 impact for me.

[sullysnet]

only way I have been able to get my movies to not stop is moving to my share being created inside the shield TV and setting the dev log under buffer in the developer settings to max of 16MB. Any other config,  switch to NFS didn't work. I'm wonder if the shield is dropping
packets or something. What I find odd is I never had an issue on my 2017 model, which I still own. It has only been an issue with the 2019 model.

1. setup share in mounts on the shield tv
2. enable developer settings by clicking about a few times (I recall like 4 or 5 times) then it will show in the menu
3. go into the dev settings and turn on log buffer to max 16MB
4. then go into Kodi and you will see the shares, then I right click on my folders and set the content. One thing to note that I have split up my folders to only have 50 movies per folder. I found that too many movies inside one folder would cause issues.

[VonMagnum]

Mine IS the 2017 model and it's stopping randomly.  I haven't had a chance to test my updated cache setting tweak, though.  I think there's some kind of memory-like issue, though based on how it stopped within 3 minutes when I had other apps running in the background compared to when I didn't and it took 40-120+ minutes to stop on average.  What I always loved about AppleTV playing anything streaming (whether local from iTunes or from Apple) is that it loads the entire movie onto the drive as fast it bloody well can and plays it off the buffered drive, not "live streaming".  I've NEVER had it act up (for music either) unless either the WiFi connection went wonky for some reason (never seems to happen on my newer routers that have much greater range and speed, but 15 years ago was a different story) or iTunes stops sending or whatever.  It seems like some kind of interrupt when KODI freezes (runs out of buffer or the SMB process locks up) and that's what I saw at first when I updated my Mac to an SSD and Mojave, but Mojave changed a lot of settings and how they behaved and restored some others for power control/sleep that I had turned off.  Once I straightened that stuff out, it mostly stopped freezing and worked fine for awhile until that firmware update seemed to trigger these random "stops".  I did have random stops once before with Krypton, but the CEC controls were turned on.  Turning them off got rid of it until that firmware update.

[Pirivan]

Mine IS the 2017 model and it's stopping randomly.  I haven't had a chance to test my updated cache setting tweak, though.  I think there's some kind of memory-like issue, though based on how it stopped within 3 minutes when I had other apps running in the background compared to when I didn't and it took 40-120+ minutes to stop on average.  What I always loved about AppleTV playing anything streaming (whether local from iTunes or from Apple) is that it loads the entire movie onto the drive as fast it bloody well can and plays it off the buffered drive, not "live streaming".  I've NEVER had it act up (for music either) unless either the WiFi connection went wonky for some reason (never seems to happen on my newer routers that have much greater range and speed, but 15 years ago was a different story) or iTunes stops sending or whatever.  It seems like some kind of interrupt when KODI freezes (runs out of buffer or the SMB process locks up) and that's what I saw at first when I updated my Mac to an SSD and Mojave, but Mojave changed a lot of settings and how they behaved and restored some others for power control/sleep that I had turned off.  Once I straightened that stuff out, it mostly stopped freezing and worked fine for awhile until that firmware update seemed to trigger these random "stops".  I did have random stops once before with Krypton, but the CEC controls were turned on.  Turning them off got rid of it until that firmware update.

FYI the cache tweaks I made have not had a huge impact, still some stops during smaller (less than 6GB) 1080p files.  It might be helping but not completely resolving the issue; I may need to experiment more.

Also might be worth keeping an eye on this github pull request: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/17209

It's for v19 (which I am on) and if I understand the github page correctly, this change will bump samba-gplv3 to version 4.11.4 when matrix v19 alpha1 is released, which is currently 89% complete.  It's possible that this may assist with our issue.  I may be completely misunderstanding the github page and this change has already been merged into the nightly v19 masters (which I have been installing), not completely sure on that.

[VonMagnum]

I had a problem with the cache settings. I just converted the German BD of Super Fuzz to use not only the previous DVD's English (original) soundtrack, but the US VHS version as well and fixed its 24FPS to be 23.98 so it will properly switch modes.  Everything worked great on my FireTV upstairs.  I ran it on my home theater with the NVidia Shield downstairs and it locked up.  I recall having "some" movies act like that with cache settings set to buffer the local network many MANY versions of KODI ago when I last played with them.  Well, whatever it is KODI doesn't like it's still an issue now.  I discard the local network cache mode and it plays just fine once again...until it "stops" for no apparent reason (which it did three times during the movie!).  Each time I tried manipualting something else (forced SMB1 only, SMB2 only and SMB3 only for example) and NOTHING I did stopped it from exiting.  

I also tried mounting my Mac server's drives from within the Shield as someone suggested worked for them.  This, of course changes the addresses of ALL the movies (so you'd have to rescan your entire database to really use it and any editing that might be needed to get it where it was before.... I add (Atmos) and (DTS X) and (Auro3D) tags after the movies that have them as KODI can't detect them.   What a PITA that would be without some kind of database edit to redirect all the addresses to the new ones).  In any case, I just manually started Super Fuzz from one of them.  Instead of "stopping" it "froze" instead and then continued playing like 8 seconds later.  That's what Krypton used to do to me on the Shield sometimes. 

I'm starting to think it really is some kind of networking bug that only affects the Shield specifically (i.e. FireTV is "Android" based too and it works fine with Leia 18.5).  I guess it's back to playing movies on the Zidoo with Krypton.  I actually scanned everything with their native player (it's smooth as can be for frame rate switching), but it turns out it cannot read DTS tracks from MP4/M4V files and over half my library is M4V due to wanting to keep as much compatible with the Apple TV as possible over the years. I don't want to have to convert them all to MKV containers just to play them.  I suppose I could I just convert the DTS:X and DTS 7.1 tracks (I had DD 5.1 redundant tracks for iTunes/AppleTV compatibility on most of them).  But I had a freeze with that player using NFS already too so I'm not sure how reliable it is over the Network here either (that would definitely make it not worth the bother).  KODI 17.6 Krypton works great on it except it doesn't frame rate switch properly (but at least it plays the entire movie).

[Pirivan]

Possible a networking bug on the Shield for sure.  It's possible that the SMB configuration that mrmc uses gets 'around' that issue.  Have you tried a test with a problematic movie with mrmc?  You don't need to setup mrmc lite at all, you can just configure it to point to a single file and then attempt playback.  So far that is the only 'fix' I have encountered for this sort of issue.  I haven't purchased the full version and migrated over to it as I am hopeful that Nvidia or Kodi will patch the issue somehow but I am starting to consider it given that it's a pretty frustrating bug.

[VonMagnum]

Possible a networking bug on the Shield for sure.  It's possible that the SMB configuration that mrmc uses gets 'around' that issue.  Have you tried a test with a problematic movie with mrmc?  You don't need to setup mrmc lite at all, you can just configure it to point to a single file and then attempt playback.  So far that is the only 'fix' I have encountered for this sort of issue.  I haven't purchased the full version and migrated over to it as I am hopeful that Nvidia or Kodi will patch the issue somehow but I am starting to consider it given that it's a pretty frustrating bug.

I've got MRMC on my FireTV 2nd Gen (haven't used it in a long time since KODI works fine there).  I haven't tried it on the Shield.  I'd miss add-ons (even something as simple of global search and key-map editors).  I did install SPMC some time ago, but only did the basic setup.  I'm going to update its database, etc. and see how well it works out.  Maybe that will work until some point where KODI might work right again.  I don't need 4K features, etc. right now, just basic 2K playback with Atmos/X passthrough, etc.  I can always use the Zidoo, but it doesn't sync frame rates with their hardware so it's a little rough around the edges.