I’m not sure about how this works in kodi but in jellyfin the client might request a different resolution which causes the server to try and reencode the provided file on the fly. In my case my server isn’t fast enough for this which leads to constant buffering

Your router doesn’t handle LAN traffic so an upgrade shouldn’t make any difference, unless you have multiple VLANs and are passing traffic between them and don’t have a Layer 3 switch in use to handle inter-VLAN routing.

I would probably start with an iperf test for download bandwidth to the Pi from the server. If that looks OK then I would benchmark the NFS share for read speed on the Pi, make sure that’s not doing something weird.

If that all looks good then I would probably suspect that Kodi either isn’t using hardware acceleration properly, or the specific media codec is not supported by the Pi for hardware acceleration.

Are you by any chance using flat Ethernet cables? Those are not to spec and are vulnerable to radio noise. Friends don’t let friends buy and use flat Ethernet cables.

Before getting all crazy and changing the setup why don’t you try Wi-Fi. Yes Wi-Fi. Your cable might only be 100mbit and your WiFi may be faster.

Wi-Fi 5 can theoretically transmit data at speeds of up to 3.5 Gbps. And obviously WiFi 6 and 7 are even faster.

In my living room, buffering happens when the connection is only WiFi, but you are on ethernet already (which solves that for me).

pi4 libreelec

Have you considered getting one of these small Chinese “Android TV” boxes?

To me it looks like you don’t have enough power, either on the Pi4 side to decode, or the mini-pc to encode.

All these answers are wrong you want Stremio.

can you run something like iperf3 or openspeedtest between the server and client to prove its a network throughput issue?

do you have a network switch you can add to avoid switching through your router (if it is indeed bad?)

Have you ensured you arent unknowingly using wifi at either end?

Just get a tablet and run VLC. Hardware transcoding is a privilege, not a necessity.

I have a similar setup but my nfs server is not a mini pc.

You could try diagnosing if it’s the network or if your mini pc is too busy (maybe out of disk i/o?).

If that’s too hard, temporarly stop all other programs on the mini pc. Does it help?

Does streaming something from the internet to kodi work without freezes? If it’s ok, then network is likely not the issue

Last but not least, does playing the same video from an USB stick work smoothly? If not, maybe the quality is too high or the video is x265

The Pi4 USB controller and network adapter share bandwidth. Do you have any devices on the USB port that could be causing collisions? I really can’t think of anything in that kind of scenario that would cause that sort of issue unless somehow you were using USB for video out…

Kodi on my 2015 Nvidia Shield doesn’t stutter for me playing back 30GB+ 4k files on a 1Gb network from an ancient (2012) AMD Athlon TrueNAS box. It could be network related, but you can test this from another machine (laptop, desktop, etc) or by using local playback on the pi. I have cheap network hardware, and have never needed better. All this is to say Kodi mounting NFS shouldn’t need much bandwidth or high end gear. Perhaps the issue is on the playback side. Good luck!

Edit: and an

Do you experience buffering if you watch on a pc / laptop on VLC via network? This will tell you if it’s network speed related or hardware power related. I would assume the pi is not quite powerful enough. I am using a device called a Vero 4k+ and it works wonderfully. But my network setup sounds similar to yours, I just have an smb share on my pc and I added it as a source in kodi.

Have you tried reading to your kid instead

Change the baby for a dog. You’re welcome.