[mhw1066]

The video will play for several minutes, then the image freezes. The audio continues for 10 to 15 seconds, then silence. If I stop then resume, it will play for another several minutes, then freeze again.

Kodi 20.4
Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K max

It plays fine on an Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K running an earlier version of Kodi.

The debug log:
https://paste.kodi.tv/verozoveve.kodi

Thanks

[fritsch]

With 300M Cache, you will need 900M of memory. Reduce your cache to maybe 50M only and retry, please.

[mhw1066]

I changed the cache setting (also, I upgraded to Kodi 20.5). It fixed all those errors in the log but the video still freezes.

New debug log:
https://paste.kodi.tv/kagegisihi.kodi

Thanks

[fritsch]

Please add the share with its IP address again and play the same file from the files menu. Looks like a network issue.

[mhw1066]

OK, I hope I did this right. I added a new source giving it the IP address of my network drive and played the video from the video file menu. It still freezes.

New log:
https://paste.kodi.tv/uqijuxacuh.kodi

Thanks

[fritsch]

So then. Following steps I suggest:
a) Upgrade to v21
b) Try an otg network USB Ethernet device instead of WiFi.

[mhw1066]

A little more experimentation and the problem is clearly with the Fire TV Stick 4K Max's ability to connect to wifi.

Both Kodi and VLC have the exact same freezing problem on the 4K Max. But both Kodi and VLC play the video perfectly on an older Fire TV Stick 4K. And that's with both sticks plugged into the same TV.

So thanks so much for your help but I think I need a better streaming device.

[fritsch]

A little more experimentation and the problem is clearly with the Fire TV Stick 4K Max's ability to connect to wifi.

Both Kodi and VLC have the exact same freezing problem on the 4K Max. But both Kodi and VLC play the video perfectly on an older Fire TV Stick 4K. And that's with both sticks plugged into the same TV.

So thanks so much for your help but I think I need a better streaming device.

I use mine in combination with a USB-OTG ethernet adapter (3.0 Gigabit, running at 2.0 with > 300 Mbit/s) ... works nicely. For the record and others reading this: With the "300M" cache you said, you only made the problem worse, cause the system itself ran out of memory.

[mhw1066]

So I was considering going all in on an Nvidia Shield Pro, but then I thought-- doggone it, that 3 year old Fire TV Stick 4K can play the video over wifi, why the heck can't the newer 4K Max? So I bought a plain Fire TV stick for $24 and it has no trouble playing the video.

So... the 4K Max is broken? It can play most videos, but not all? Is that possible?

Anyway, I'm happy.

[signde]

The latest Fire Stick 4K max has horrid performance reading files off SMB shares over Wi-Fi. Do as fritsch suggests and get a $20 OTG USB ethernet adapter. Cable Matters has one that works well - link. 

Until I moved to ethernet I couldn't play anything locally on this device. This problem is well documented - link. Those results are for a Cube 3 but the latest stick shares the same problems.

Amazon designs these devices to work with online streaming services over https, not people using them to play media over local network shares.

[sktn77a]

Both Kodi and VLC have the exact same freezing problem on the 4K Max. But both Kodi and VLC play the video perfectly on an older Fire TV Stick 4K.

I'm having the EXACT same issue with one of my FireTV 4k Max sticks (2nd gen).  The other 3 work fine.  I've tried everything you did to no avail so I threw it in the trash and bought another one.  Problem solved.  

Oh, and this was only with MP4 files.  AVI and MKV played fine.