[techo91]

Hi everyone,
I'm not sure this question is for this forum but I will try to ask and if it's not, can a moderator please move it to the right place?

I have an Amazon Fire TV stick 4k and I'm trying to use my local NAS (TrueNAS  SMB share), and my local SQL database to watch content on Kodi through a IPsec VPN connection, which I have set up on my pfsense firewall.
I use this VPN on Linux, android, iOS, MacOS and Windows with no problems for quite a long time. The connection is very reliable and is tested during several years.
I have it set on the FireTV stick using StrongSwan and custom settings for the encryption, I use AES128-GCM for better speed.
In general, I have set up everything and it's working. Locally I have no issues and all is working as expected. I'm using settings in advancesettings.xml file to setup my sql database and setting the buffer size and bandwidth usage.

this is the portion for the buffer:

 1 139460608 20 :


<advancedsettings>

<cache>

<buffermode>1</buffermode>

<memorysize>139460608</memorysize>

<readfactor>20</readfactor>

</cache>

</advancedsettings>

The problem is the buffering even on 1080p content sometimes when I'm out of home. Now, if I test the speed when my VPN is activated, I get around 80 Mb/s which is not bad at all giving the processor on the stick. I was expecting that that would be enough to watch even 4k content with no issues.
When I try to play 4k content, I see that the stick never jumps over 25 Mb/s speed on playing the movie, I guess until the buffer is full and then drops down to around 15 Mb/s. During the playback I'm watching the processor usage and I can see that it never gets more then 50 % per core, which makes me think that it's not the bottleneck. There is plenty of bandwidth left for Kodi to use and there is enough processor left for the VPN to use. The VPN server also has plenty of bandwidth and nobody else is using it except me at the moment of testing. Both ends have 1Gb/s internet speeds and I'm sure this is not the issue.
If playing 1080p content then the bandwidth usage is lower and looks like there are no issues. I did a test using my mobile phone, which at the moment of testing had a 4g connection with around 20 Mb/s, and were not able to watch 1080p without buffering. Again Kodi was not using all the available bandwidth, It was using around 8 Mb/s, which is unacceptable.

I'm not sure where the problem is and what else I could try to change to improve the situation. Do you guys have any advice for me? Is there anything else I can try?

Thanks in advance.

[Klojum]

Generic questions are for generic forum threads, specific questions are better off in individual threads, so I split off your post.

As far as VPN stuff goes, we have a VPN policy (wiki) on forum.
VPN connection speeds can vary quite a bit, and it's really outside the Kodi support scope.

[techo91]

Hi Klojum,

thanks for moving my topic and replying.
You are absolutely right that VPN speeds can vary a lot. The good thing in this case is that I have a gigabit connections everywhere and I'm constantly monitoring the quality of them. I can certainly tell you that in my case using the before mentioned fiber optics feeds the speeds are quite constant.
Always before I make my tests I make sure the speeds without VPN are at least 900 Mb/s both ways and using VPN I have at least 100 Mb/s or more. Before meeting that, I don't consider the tests to be under optimal conditions. I'm pretty sure that the internet is not the issue here, it's either VPN capabilities of the stick
or Kodi itself is limiting the connection for some reason. If I see that on the stick I can do 80 Mb/s IPsec IKEv2 connection with AES128-GCM encryption, that is saying to me that I have bandwidth available. CPU usage is low, that only leaves Kodi to be the one which is not using all the resources.
Why is that? I'm hoping someone who has tried something similar to share some wisdom.

P.S. I just tried to use VLC for the same task and interesting enough, I doesn't buffer even on 4K content.