Hi Everyone,

I am using a Raspberry Pi 2 with Raspbian as a headless server. One of its jobs is to provide streaming of content stored on 2 external hard drives, usually to Kodi on my Amazon FireTV (Using SAMBA).

Generally it works fine but some times I get constant buffering issues while trying to stream video.

I suspect that is usually related to my wireless router.

So far when the issue has occurred I have listed all the logs in /etc/samba/ and /var/log/ by date and time "ls -lht" then checking though the logs that were updated at the time of one of the buffering instances occurred.

I found one of my laptops was fighting to be a primary Samba server so disabled samba on that laptop but don't think this was the root cause as the issue has occurred since.

Can anyone give me some pointers on the logical process to follow to track down the root cause of the issue?

Thanks for your time

One possible root cause is simply flakiness of your WiFi. You might see it by checking the round trip times of a ping.

In my house, WiFi has occasional hickups that are bad for anything streaming like Skype or audio/video. I installed Powerline and found it's lightyears better in terms of reliability, with comparable bandwidth.

@berndbausch I agree completely. Maybe I didn't explain myself clearly enough. I would like to know the logical process to follow to troubleshoot the issue to rule out the issue being related to my Raspberry Pi configuration.

I dont currently have any Powerline devices but also agree that they would provide more stability in general.

You aren't relating much about the capabilities of the WiFi router/AP,... 802.11g is generally inadequate (in most homes) to stream anything other than standard definition video...

See:
http://www.avsforum.com/forum/39-net...streaming.html

Personally,... I'm nearsighted, and therefore do not bother to try to stream anything over 480p to any devices in the system (and for my daughter's cartoons, that's more than enough).

Hi JaseP generally it works fine I have a Wireless N router and get a peek of about 12MB/s which seems to be sufficient even to stream 1080p movies up to about 10GB. So its not about the max throughput. I do think its most likely related to the router and WIFI/Interference but would like to rule out anything on my Raspberry Pi.

Thanks for your input.

You could collect some evidence; not sure if this really rules out any server problems.

For example, run ping from the Pi to the FireTV, collecting the output. In parallel, run sar to look at CPU, disk and memory usage. When a streaming problem occurs, remember the time as precisely as possible and try to correlate it with the ping and sar logs.

I don't know how open the FireTV is; can you also run ping there? Or do you have access to any logs there?

Rather vague, but that's all I can think of. If your troubles are caused by changing WiFi conditions, you should see peaks in the round trip times of ping packets; I could clearly see it here at home. If you don't see such peaks, first try again with a reduced ping interval (-i option).

Thanks berndbausch I will give that a go. It might take a couple of days before it occurs again but once it does I will test your suggestion. The FireTv is sort of open as in I have it jailbroken so I should be able to install\Enable SSHD on it.