SOLVED Kodi android issues streaming from different subnet

[wagex]

ive looked everywhere and cannot find a solution to our, probably very unique problem. My cousin and I have a network bridging our two networks from down the street over a wds wireless connection, we consistantly get 100mbs both ways when testing from our computers, here is where it gets strange.

we both have a server on our own networks, and have them mapped to eachothers kodi installs

myserver 192.168.10.5
his server 192.168.50.6
we are using a tunnel network of 192.168.30.1/24

now, on a desktop pc i can play movies fine from his server, and he can play movies fine from my server.

on his firetv he can play movies fine from his own server and i can play movies fine from my server.

but neither of our fire tv's can handle playing from eachothers servers.

the confusing bit is the bridge network has plenty of throughput since we can both play movie fine from eachothers servers on a pc, and the firetv's can handle the bandwidth fine because we can play our own movies. (~100mps of throughput and the movies are like 30mbs bitrate tops.)

kodi in windows has no problem playing from either which way which is making us believe its an android issue. I can watch the bitrate in kodi and see its well below our transmission speed (like 25mbs), and the cpu cores are all relatively low so its not overloading the android box itself.

it seems android does not like other subnets or something because my cell phone seems to only get like 20-30mbs from his network but 100+ from mine. this is what we are trying to figure out a simple fix we are overlooking.

 

[JrClocker]

Is the netmask the same between your PC and fire TV?

 

[wagex]

Is the netmask the same between your PC and fire TV?

yeah, all 3 networks are on the 255.255.255.0 netmask (/24)

here is a network diagram

 

[wagex]

well, i had an idea im giving a shot will post back and let yall know.
i have a vm running debian i use to handle my dockers, but i figured this wouldnt put any extra load on it so might as well use that to give it a shot.
basically all i did was mount \\nas\kids_movies\ /mnt/clint-nas/
then setup samba and did a basic smb share over my network sharing the /mnt/clint-nas/ now to add that to my kodi library and see if it works or not.

 

[wagex]

well, i had an idea im giving a shot will post back and let yall know.
i have a vm running debian i use to handle my dockers, but i figured this wouldnt put any extra load on it so might as well use that to give it a shot.
basically all i did was mount \\nas\kids_movies\ /mnt/clint-nas/
then setup samba and did a basic smb share over my network sharing the /mnt/clint-nas/ now to add that to my kodi library and see if it works or not.

this did not work. i don't get it.

 

[knoober]

I'm throwing this out there more for my own learning that because I have any reason to think it would work...

Wouldn't a vlan allow you to throw all applicable machines on the same subnet and perhaps workaround this problem? I'm not sure if a vlan will work between 2 different networks though. Good luck anyway though

 

[wagex]

I'm throwing this out there more for my own learning that because I have any reason to think it would work...

Wouldn't a vlan allow you to throw all applicable machines on the same subnet and perhaps workaround this problem? I'm not sure if a vlan will work between 2 different networks though. Good luck anyway though

could try that but then that would throw some other stuff for a curve and imo not worth the time it would take to configure, we actually think we might have figured out the issue, will post back with results soon. i think it has to do with the antennas being on auto link aggregation and the small cache that the android devices have available. by the time it fills up the link isnt fully utilized (takes about 5+ seconds for the anteannas to go from 24mbs to 100mbs and it only takes a few seconds to fill the ache) then by the time its like hey i need summore the link has already degraded back to 24mbs..... so heres to hoping by setting the anteannas to hold a 300mbs connection that will fix our issues. have to wait for my cousin to get home because i cant login to his antenna to change that setting.

 

[wagex]

whelp, that didnt work, as for the different subnet that doesnt effect it either i suppose, not sure what is going on. to test the subnet issue, i mapped cousins nas to one of my linux vm's then did a samba share broadcasting over my network, still no beans.

setting the antenna speed manually didnt help either so there goes that idea. i don't get it, it should work. lol i mean, i can stream 60mbs movies in the same codecs fine from my server, on the same device, but a 30-40mbs video no beans from his nas... anything other than android devices and it works fine, suspecting something with the android network stack i guess, last shot in the dark is hard wiring the devices which i need to buy an adapter for, which makes no sense since my wifi can do over 200mbs. idk

 

[knoober]

Probably not the issue but samba can be finicky. For instance : I've got a share sitting in /opt/foo/bar that can be reached from a desktop machine but cannot be reached from game console. The previous location of the share was /home/user/foo/bar and was completely accessible. I've tried adjusting all kinds of stuff in the smb.conf and with the samba user permissions/password/etc and just cannot access any share from that game console unless the share is below the user directory.

That's all I can say but I do look forward to hearing the solution if you find it.

 

[wagex]

Probably not the issue but samba can be finicky. For instance : I've got a share sitting in /opt/foo/bar that can be reached from a desktop machine but cannot be reached from game console. The previous location of the share was /home/user/foo/bar and was completely accessible. I've tried adjusting all kinds of stuff in the smb.conf and with the samba user permissions/password/etc and just cannot access any share from that game console unless the share is below the user directory.

That's all I can say but I do look forward to hearing the solution if you find it.

yeah i think the only other option we have is trying a different pair of antennas and see if it has something to do with them, perhaps in the future a pair of ubiquiti antennas, also were trying new software today to see if it has something to do with kodi on android specifically or not.

 

[Janus67]

I know it isn't Kodi, but have you thought about using Plex for the same purpose?

 

[wagex]

I know it isn't Kodi, but have you thought about using Plex for the same purpose?

the funky thing, it IS kodi, switched over to MRMC works like a charm, so dumb. i might play with kodi's network settings and see if i can tune something a bit before i move over to mrmc 100% it has to be something dumb like block size or something that the antennas dont like i have no idea lol.

Not a fan of plex 1. it doesnt do dts passthrough 2. it would have to stream over the internet no way to make it recognize the server on a different subnet afaik. although, i do run a plex server already lol its just for my parents to stream stuff.

Thanks for ideas though.

not marking solved yet since i'm not 100% sure on what ima do to fix it.

 

[Railgun]

Plex can pass through HD audio. Depends on the client device though. EG PS4 has no issue, but will transcode video. Apple TV is fine with video, but will xcode audio. Very annoying.

And you can also tell the plex server what subsets are considered local to avoid transcoding, which sounds like the issue. You’re looking at the issue from the network side, but have you looked at the server side to see what it’s sending to the client?

 

[wagex]

Plex can pass through HD audio. Depends on the client device though. EG PS4 has no issue, but will transcode video. Apple TV is fine with video, but will xcode audio. Very annoying.

And you can also tell the plex server what subsets are considered local to avoid transcoding, which sounds like the issue. You’re looking at the issue from the network side, but have you looked at the server side to see what it’s sending to the client?

thanks for the idea man.

im not using plex, sorry, dont like it. i dont like having server software running on a backend to do something the clients can do themselves, it works for a lot of people but not for my setup, yes i know it supports passthrough, everyone tells me that, but with the devices im using it will not pass through DTS audio, where as kodi/mrmc (fork of kodi) will. also im not going to re-encode my 10tb of movies lol. plus plex phones home, alot.

MRMC works fine, sorry i will mark the thread as solved.