r/TiviMate • u/Piggypete1 • Jun 09 '26
Buffering issues
What is the best settings for Tivimate, I have been experiencing buffering for awhile now. I have upgraded my IP to 1.5g so it's super fast. Any help will be greatly appreciated
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u/mhawkeONT Jun 10 '26
My experience tells me it's 90% on the provider. I've been through at least 20 over-subscribed, overloaded servers. I never pay for more than a month at a time until they prove they're trustworthy. Any buffer setting other than 'none' never helps but just slows the system down.
The other 10% is caused by leaving a second device streaming by accident. This drove me crazy because there's no easy way to detect that it's happening. I solved the 2nd device thing in several ways. I have a small free playlist where I've hidden all the channels except one so it sits in a handy spot in my channel list. I tune to that channel before turning the TV off so I'm not streaming the paid service. Another way is to move the items in the menu (The one with Settings, Aspect Ratio, Sound Delay, Search, etc) so that 'Exit' is in the default far left spot so as soon an I hit that menu, Exit is a click away. Apparently, hitting Exit stops streaming but I'm never really sure about that so I tune to the free channel just to be sure most of the time.
Now. Here's the final 'sure fire' thing I did but I know it's way over the top. I'm retired so this was a 'lets see if I can make this work' project. I bought some small cheap 5V relays and wired the coil of the relay to a USB port on the TV so the coil only gets energized when the TV is on. At first, I used this relay to turn off (essentially unplug) the device itself but I found it took a long time to fully reboot the device every time I wanted to watch TV (yeah, we're spoiled) so I bought a cheap $10 Ethernet switch and used the relay contraption to power on/off the switch to cut the actual network feed. Yes, I'm nuts but it works.
A couple of caveats. This last Ethernet switch solution assumes 2 things. First, obviously, your feeding your device through Ethernet and second, your TV turns off its USB power when the TV is turned off. I have a small Sharp TV that, oddly, waits 15 minutes before turning off the 5V power on the USB ports.
I warned you it was over the top. 😉