How's your kodi performance?

How do you guys find Kodi performs when using an encyrpted rclone mount as the media source? I’ve started using it like this recently and find it’s a little bit hit and miss. I have good internet but find the media will sometimes buffer (changing advancedsettings.xml has helped) and sometimes just stop - kodi kicks me out of the video back to main menu.

Does anyone have any tips or settings which need to be tweaked to get this all working nice?

I’m using standard rclone mount options. Do I need to configure --max-read-ahead perhaps?

Other people have reported setting max read ahead to 200M helps a lot with this.

Cheers, I’ve changed the mount to include that option. The streaming/buffering seems good now. The only issue I still observe is being kicked out the videos. It looks like this only happens when I pause the media - after resuming, it plays for a few minutes and then just stops (I’m guessing it plays the rest of what is buffered). It’s like it’s able to play the files continuously but not with starts/stops.

Any idea why this would happen (or anything I can do to provide more information)?

How long are you pausing it for? Assuming kodi keeps the file handle open, rclone in turn will keep the socket open to the remote. If you pause for longer than 5 minutes then the connection will timeout as no data is transferring. You can tweak this with --timeout

I did a few tests and it’s much less than this - a pause of 1-2 minutes is enough for the video to stop after resuming it for a few minutes. I’ve tried a few versions of openelec/kodi and this behavior exists on all of them. Is it worthwhile adding a log file on the mount to see if there are errors at the same time as the videos stop?

Yes a log should tell you what is going on hopefully.

cool - I’ll enable logging and see what happens. In the mean time I’d be interested to hear of any other users experiencing the same thing. Feels like this should be a fairly common issue in this use case as I don’t believe I’m doing anything unique here.

(or maybe people don’t like coffee as much as I do, results in a lot of media pausing!)

Hi @ncw,

I finally got around to enabling logging to see what was happening with the videos quitting. At every moment where this happens there is a corresponding error:

ReadFileHandle.Read error: failed to authenticate decrypted block - bad password?

Looks like this is a known issue https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/873 assuming the cause is the same.

I haven’t tracked down that problem yet :frowning: It isn’t a race condition.

If you can get it to do it reliably, can you email me a log (to nick@craig-wood.com with “rclone issue 873” in the title) using -v --debug-fuse --dump-headers of it happening. I suggest you subscribe to that issue on github (button on right) and I’ll put updates there.

Thanks

Nick

When you say ‘encrypted rclone’ are you using rclone’s crypt? Or are using ENCFS? Also, how are you accessing it from kodi? I mean what type of source? SMB? NFS? I’ve been using kodi with a rclone crypt mount and it has been working great. No issue at all. The only difference is I am using a http server ontop of my mount and kodi is connecting to the http server. I wonder if that is why mine has been fine. I have not adjusted max_read_ahead or anything else.

Rclone crypt. The mount is on the same system that kodi runs so it’s a local disk as far as Kodi knows. I’ve had Kodi connecting to another linux machine with the rclone mount presented over nginx, and this did work fine. Id rather have the mount in several places (ie on each kodi instance) than have it in only one place where bandwidth is contended.

@ncw I’ll get that logging setup and let you know.

although it should be apparent by now - I emailed through these logs last night. Cheers

Wouldn’t it be neat for someone to create a kodi plugin that used rclone’s API (that doesn’t exist yet) and stream directly? I wish my python skills were up to that task.

Would you mind sharing the details of your setup?

@calisro not sure if you have been about much recently. But I too would be interested in hearing more about your setup particularly the http server that you are connecting to. Cheers.

Why not just use Plex and then Kodi plugin for it.

for the reason I said in my post - bandwidth is contended on the server. If I have a ‘rclone move’ happening at the same time as I’m trying to watch media then playback suffers. I have a 100mb/s connection at home so it makes sense to connect to ACD directly rather than through the one server which is often busy.

This is an old thread anyway and performance is fine now on new versions.