The toddler loves having Kodi full of all their faves but I haven’t been able to iron out all the buffering I’m getting streaming from my mini-pc NFS mounted shares to the pi4 libreelec hooked up via Ethernet in the living room. Everything is wired, so I wouldn’t think that would be an issue but here I am about to put down a couple hundred dollars for a Synology router that looks like the monolith from 2001. Is this going to do the trick, you think? Is there another router recommended to keep a distributed little homelab (any 10tb spread between various usb hdd, raspberry pi’s and mini PCs all hosting a variety of containers and services) running smoothly? Budget I’m hoping to keep under 300 and lower the better but happy toddler and buttery smooth streaming over lan is the priority.
Woah really?? I am actually…
Your setup sounds much too complex and misses key information and troubleshooting steps. The flat cables are kind of the cherry on top.
You need to start laying out which devices grab which stuff from where and which cables, switches, routers and panels you are using.
Otherwise people wont be able to help you. A new router isnt going to help you at all.
Example: I run plex on a terra miniserver, stream to my phones and computers over wifi (the server is connected via cat7 wired networking with a tested gigabit connection). I also stream to a libreelec-pi in another room which is also on wifi and has issues sometimes. That is why I‘m gonna wire the connection later this month so that is no issue. I also have an appletv in the livingroom which is connected by wire and has no buffering. There are 3 gigabit switches and a fritz!box also connected but they‘re all gigabit as well: Between PCs and the main router, appletv and the main router and the server and the main router.
It’s really neither much too nor very complex at all. I have a home lab stack of mini PCs and raspberry pi’s in my office hooked up to a switch to my router. Among the stack is an intel nuc with a few attached usb hdd, sharing those drives via NFS and Samba and hosting Jellyfin. The same machine serves jellyfin to my other devices and a few family members over the internet. That machine is more than capable for the task. In order to get that media to the living room I have a raspberry pi 4 running libreelec also hard wired to the Ethernet also to the same switch (running through a cable window in the wall). No, I had not heard of the issues with flat Ethernet cables that are otherwise advertised as cat 7 compatible, because I have (some) of the machines networked with flat Ethernet cables. Those are getting replaced.
For the most part the pi4 libreelec machine handles content fine. But I have a number of multichannel audio, hd not-quite-4k animated movies that do routinely cause buffering issues. It seems most likely upon review and after the comments in this thread that it was a simple bottleneck at the pi4. The same content plays unstuttwring on other more equipped machines on the network. I do think the router is on its way out though and deserves an upgrade but that looks to be an optional next step. I’m replacing the pi as a media machine for now.