Shooty* 4 Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 (edited) All, I'm a little reluctant to post this as it's more a Fire TV Stick issue than an Emby one, which is why I'm putting it in general rather than the Kodi or android sections, but having looked at the Fire TV and Kodi forums that are out there: 1. I prefer the opinion of you lot 2. The other forums looks like massive scrums So... I've been googling "Fire TV Stick Kodi Ram" this morning as I looked at the system tab, and only had 77 meg "memory" available. I've got, like, 2.4 gig still available on the sd card, I think (have to check that when I get home). As I understand it, that "memory" that it shows is Ram. All the threads I could find failed to distinguish between ram and storage, so were pretty useless. I'm concerned that my memory usage is high, and that 77meg available is low. I've been looking to see if there is an app I can use to chart running processes. Apparently not, without rooting. I'm using Kodi with Mimic skin. I got brilliant playback on all file types streamed from my server last night immediately after disabling MediaCodec, but I got awful buffering this morning on all media types. Restarting the router to get a "clean" connection and restarting fire tv stick made no difference. Nothing changed, settings wise, from the brilliant playback I got last night, so to have it degrade this morning was disappointing. I'm wondering if the disabling of MediaCodec didn't "stick". (No pun intended) I've got to play around with it tonight, but I'm also wondering if the 77meg low ram issue might be feeding into the buffering. The wifi signal is "good", I've got the stick 1m away from the TV on an HDMI extension cable. I'm going to install the Maintenance app tonight and purge the cache, etc, see if that helps. My initial problem seemed to be confined to MPEG2 files in an MKV wrapper (straight DVD files without recoding), but has now extended to H264. Bit rate doesn't seem to come into it: they all buffer, whereas they didn't last night. That's a bit of a ramble. Apologies. I'm tired, and work has just kicked off. I guess I'm asking if anyone has any optimisation tips they'd care to share as other forums seem conflicted, out of date, or talking sh... rubbish. Thanks. Edited July 24, 2015 by Shooty* Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CBers 6766 Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 Ram and Storage are 2 different things, unless the stick is using the storage as virtual memory (swap). So you're using the E4K addon? Have you tried resetting the Kodi database from within the addon settings and letting it resync? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shooty* 4 Posted July 24, 2015 Author Share Posted July 24, 2015 Hi Cbers, appreciate your continuing assistance Yes, I am indeed using the E4K addon. I haven't reset the database, no. I wasn't sure there was much point. I get a full resync despite unticking the 'sync on connection' box every time I start Kodi up. That's another reason that I think the settings aren't sticking. Of course, I'm probably missing something, maybe something server side. On the other hand, ticking the "hide sync progress" box did nothing either. Now that I know exactly how I like it, I'm half tempted to restore to factory settings, wipe the SD, and start from scratch again to get rid of any problems that the last few weeks of constant tinkering have caused. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Angelblue05 4130 Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 (edited) No, the settings not sticking is a bug that will be resolved in the next version that will probably be released later today (beta). If you are intending to do a reset, first set the options like you want them, then restart Kodi then do the reset. Edited July 24, 2015 by Angelblue05 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shooty* 4 Posted July 24, 2015 Author Share Posted July 24, 2015 (edited) Ah ha. Cracking. Thank you, Angelblue05. That won't apply to the MediaCodec setting though, will it, as that's a Kodi thing? It'll just be Emby settings which are fixed in any release today? Anyone tried Isengard on Stick yet? Edited July 24, 2015 by Shooty* Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jluce50 118 Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 First of all, I think 77MB is probably normal if my experience is any indicator. I typically have around 90-100MB free with the Arctic: Zephyr Exploded skin. The stick does have 1GB of RAM, but half that is reserved for the GPU. You might be able to run the "top" command via adb and sort on memory usage to see just what's going on. As an aside, I've also been having some strange issues, though luckily not playback related. Everything synced fine at first, but starting yesterday the incremental syncs don't seem to be working. I watched a couple episodes and upon exiting the fullscreen player I could see the watched indicator appear until the incremental sync ran, at which point it reset back to unwatched. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Angelblue05 4130 Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 @@jluce50 Are you able to post your log in the Kodi section from that time? Or next time it happens? Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jluce50 118 Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 @@jluce50 Are you able to post your log in the Kodi section from that time? Or next time it happens? Thanks Yeah, I was planning on doing shortly :-). It's weird, I'm running the same version of Kodi and addons on my PC and it works fine... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shooty* 4 Posted July 24, 2015 Author Share Posted July 24, 2015 First of all, I think 77MB is probably normal if my experience is any indicator. I typically have around 90-100MB free with the Arctic: Zephyr Exploded skin. The stick does have 1GB of RAM, but half that is reserved for the GPU. You might be able to run the "top" command via adb and sort on memory usage to see just what's going on. Lovely. That helps. Thank you. The half reserved for the GPU: does that include buffer/ cache for whatever is playing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jluce50 118 Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 (edited) Lovely. That helps. Thank you. The half reserved for the GPU: does that include buffer/ cache for whatever is playing? No, the OS portion of RAM is used for the buffer, unless cachemembuffersize is set to 0 which will cause it to use the hard drive for the buffer (only recommended if you have at least 16GB of free space). http://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Modify_the_video_cache#Cache_settings Edited July 24, 2015 by jluce50 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shooty* 4 Posted July 24, 2015 Author Share Posted July 24, 2015 OK... Right... So... Have you tinkered with your buffer size, or have you left it as it is? If tinkered, what did you change it to? Given that we both seem to only have a wee bit of Ram left, and looking at that "it will use 3x what everyou set it as", I'm guessing we haven't really got much headroom to change it, and are better of not touching it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jluce50 118 Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 I haven't had any buffering issues, so I've just left it alone. If I do have problems, I'd probably change the other two settings (see link above) first and see if that helped. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jluce50 118 Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 @@Angelblue05 I posted the log in a new thread here: http://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/23681-emby-for-kodi-incremental-sync-broken-on-fire-tv-stick/ 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14903 Posted July 24, 2015 Share Posted July 24, 2015 This is where you see the difference between the stick and the real Fire TV. 1GB of RAM is pretty small for today's devices. However, Android boxes apps into fairly small memory spaces already. I imagine Kodi is requesting a large memory space which means it can take up to 512MB IIRC, but that size is determined by the device and, given the stick really only has that much available for the whole system, it probably isn't getting that. Android studio has a nice memory monitor in it if you want to go to the trouble of installing that. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shooty* 4 Posted July 25, 2015 Author Share Posted July 25, 2015 Soooo.... I have issues. Apart from the obvious ones, it turns out I may have had router issues as well. I had a Thompson standard ISP provided thing, which today gave up the ghost and now no longer works. Turns out that 3 iPhones, 3 iPads, a kindle, 2 laptops, a sonos, 2 fire sticks and a printer was too much for it. * Who knew, right? So, I've gone for a Asus DSL-N55U as a replacement. Getting on a bit now, maybe, by some of y'all standards, but the best I could afford, I reckon. Camping for the next three days. Look forward to telling you about installation when I get back. * it was spared wired connections as a separate box handled that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jluce50 118 Posted July 26, 2015 Share Posted July 26, 2015 So, I've gone for a Asus DSL-N55U as a replacement. Getting on a bit now, maybe, by some of y'all standards, but the best I could afford, I reckon. That looks similar to the RT-N66U that I've been using for a couple years now. It's served me very well and I have no plans to upgrade anytime soon. I expect you'll be quite pleased. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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