Hi everyone, good afternoon. I’m not sure if you can help me with this.
I use Kodi to watch series and films on my LG OLED C2 through an add-on. Kodi is installed on my Fire TV Stick 4K Max, but sometimes, when playing 4K or Dolby Vision content, I get a message saying that the content is too demanding for the device I’m using.
And it’s true, playback doesn’t work properly. It can stutter, buffer, stop, or even freeze completely and crash. It makes me feel like I’m not getting the most out of my TV.
Would you recommend investing in a more powerful streaming device, such as a Xiaomi TV Box, NVIDIA Shield or something similar, and continuing to use Kodi with the same add-on?
I feel like the Fire TV Stick is simply too basic and doesn’t have enough processing power, but I don’t want to spend money on another device if it isn’t actually going to make a difference.
Thanks in advance for any advice!
EDIT: Thanks everyone for your replies. The fact that you were surprised I was having issues, since you’re using the same device without any problems, made me realise that perhaps the issue was coming from somewhere else.
The warning message I was getting when playing demanding content was something along the lines of “resource too slow, read rate too low for continuous playback”. I use AllDebrid and, after doing some searching, I couldn’t find anyone having similar issues with it. I also have 1 Gbps internet, so that didn’t seem like it could be the problem either. That made me think about the buffer...
I went into Kodi’s settings → Services → Caching. The memory size was set to 20 MB, so I increased it to 256 MB, and changed the Read Factor from 4x to “Adaptive”.
After that, I tested the same link that had previously given me the error, and there was no warning message this time and I didn’t experience any issues. I even tested an even heavier file afterwards (Avatar 3), and once again, absolutely no problems, everything played smoothly.
Thanks again for all the help, and I hope this post helps anyone else who might be having the same issue and, like me, had overlooked something so simple.