Kodi issues with pause/play SMB streams?

[Energen]

Hey guys.. new to unraid, came over from freenas because I liked unraid's gui better and apps/docker options.. as well as the ability to mix drive sizes..   everything is basically going good until now.

 

I set up fresh Kodi 17.1 installs (where they were previously 16.x) on my Fire TV sticks and got them all set up how I wanted them.. connected my SMB shares from unraid and everything was good.  Centralized db with Mariadb on unraid (after I finally figured out how to get that going ;))

 

Then I pause a movie.

 

When I start to play the movie again it might play for a couple seconds and then it will "crash" out of the movie back to the kodi menu.  When I play the movie again it generally doesn't resume from the same spot.  This happens every time I pause.  I enabled kodi buffering with around 60mb of cache but that didn't solve the problem.

 

I'm not sure where to even begin looking to try and fix this, there's so much new stuff since my freenas box was running without issues.  I have a new motherboard/cpu combo running now, Kodi 17.1 versus 16.x, unraid vs freenas, etc.   But this seems like a pretty specific problem that I haven't been able to find anyone else experiencing on these forums.

 

Any ideas where to start?  

 

Kodi streaming is a major part of what the server is used for, so it has to be resolved.  Perhaps I'll put one device back on Kodi 16 and see if it still happens.

 

Thanks.

[Squid]

How long are you pausing for?

Sent from my LG-D852 using Tapatalk

[Energen]

Generally, about as long as it takes to go to the refrigerator and refresh a drink.  30 sec to a couple minutes on average.

 

I just fired up one of my old Fire TV sticks with Kodi 16 and it is not experiencing the same problem, but it's not loaded up completely with all the shares, though I don't see that making a difference.  Doesn't have all the addons, etc, either.

 

Edit -- I just turned on the stick I was watching last night and although my database was destroyed (maybe because of the old stick I just tested?) my shares were still set up so I started playing a file and paused it... played it and this time I received a pop up error message, connection timed out.

 

So it would appear that the SMB connection is timing out somewhere/somehow and that's why the pause is having a problem.

 

Where do I address connections that time out? Never experienced this before...    I had my FreeNAS set up with a shared db and never had anything time out.

Edited April 30, 2017 by Energen
more info

[Energen]

Actually, this seems to be directly related to a bug(s) in Kodi 17 now that I was able to search for a connection timeout error message. 

 

Although I'm surprised nobody else here has experienced this if they are on 17 as well?

[Squid]

I for one have never seen it.  Worst I get is a nice long pause if its paused long enough for the drive to have spun down.

[Energen]

Did you upgrade to 17 from 16? It seems only fresh installs of 17 experience the problem.

 

Here's a post from the kodi forums where a user tried a few different installation methods and the results he experienced..

 

There is clearly a difference between 16 & 17 where SMB browsing is involved. I currently have one Fire TV device running 16 fine and the other one on 17 with the browsing issue.

Win10 / Fire TV / 16 = Works
Win10 / Fire TV / 16 > 17 = Works
Win10 / Fire TV / 17 = Fails
Win10 / Fire TV Stick / 16 = Works
Win10 / Fire TV Stick / 16 > 17 = Works
Win10 / Fire TV Stick / 17 = Fails
Win? / RedDot / 16 = Works
Win? / RedDot / 16 > 17 = Works
Win? / RedDot / 17 = Fails

 

I'll try a couple things to see if I can get this resolved but ultimately it looks like I may have to revert back to 16.

 

While typing this sentence though, my test stick with 16 was paused, and I just pressed play, and it started to buffer but now it's frozen. And then crash.  So, hmm..

[Squid]

9 minutes ago, Energen said:

It seems only fresh installs of 17 experience the problem

Mine was fresh.  LibreElec running 17.1 as a VM

Edited April 30, 2017 by Squid

[Energen]

Well after a bunch of messing around I'm back to Kodi 16 and still have this issue.  I can't figure out where the issue is but since I didn't have the problem with FreeNAS I'm thinking it's something with unRaid, although apparently nobody else has issues like this.  I just don't know what to do at this point.  I can't pause a video without it crashing.  It's as though the connection to the SMB share is lost by the time I press play again, as though unRaid is dropping the open connection and therefore killing the stream.

 

I've been using OpenElec and LibreElec to build the database but neither of those should be effecting the end-device play-ability, I created a custom VM to run the latest version of LibreElec to try and use the latest dev build of Kodi on the device that I thought had fixes for SMB in it, but ultimately still had the crashing issue.

 

Nothing seems to work, and again now that I've changed so much stuff all at once I don't know if it's a hardware or software related problem.  Maybe the Kodi forums are a better place for troubleshooting, but is it Kodi or is it unRaid that is the problem?  I can't say for sure.