mk808 too slow for playing flac in kodi/xbmc/spmc?

[thorstenhirsch]

Hi, though 720p moviez seem to play just fine, my mk808 has problems playing flac files. There's round about 1 little lag every minute - and by "lag" I mean that the sound just stops. Has anyone else the same problem?

- mk808
- prahjister rom 1.1
- 1080p kernel
- kodi 14.0rc (current nightlies) / spmc 13.3.x
- flac files are on a samba share that I've added in kodi/spmc

The audio output settings seem to have no effect. I experienced the lags with all 3 settings:

- optimized
- best
- fixed 48kHz

Also deactivating some features (like normalizing volume by album/track metadata) had no effect.
Meanwhile I even wrote a script to renice some processes...

- kodi -3
- mediaserver +5
- surfaceflinger +5

...but still no luck. The lags remain.
Any ideas?

edit: here's my renice script - for backup reasons

#!/system/bin/sh
# busybox is required for pidof
while true
do
    kodi=`pidof org.xbmc.kodi`

    if [ $kodi ]; then
        renice -3 $kodi
        ionice $kodi be 0
                                  
        prg=`pidof surfaceflinger`
        if [ $prg ]; then
            renice 5 $prg
        fi
                               
        prg=`pidof mediaserver`
        if [ $prg ]; then
            renice 5 $prg
        fi
    fi
            
    sleep 10
    
done  
exit 0

[phinc]

Maybe it is a network issue. Try to play a flac file from the internal storage and see if the problem persists.

[thorstenhirsch]

Maybe you're right - there's no lag when playing the same flac file from mk808's internal storage.

However, it's not like my network's bandwidth is too small, because when playing the flac file from the samba share it doesn't make a difference whether I "flood" my wifi at the same time with other things or not. I can even copy the file with kodi's file manager (samba share to internal storage) while playing it simultaneously from the samba share.

Adding some tweak parameters to the smb.conf on the server...

    socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_RCVBUF=65536 SO_SNDBUF=65536

...doesn't make any difference.

Meanwhile I also share the flac files via NFS v3 (the server doesn't support NFS v4 unfortunately) and it seems to be better than the samba shares. But occasionally there's still a lag.

[phinc]

Okay. So it seems that the problem is not the network connection itself but some kind of buffering/caching issue. I never tried Helix on MK808B, but i also have buffering promlems in SPMC. I recommend you try Beyond XBMC 3.4. That is the XBMC version i had the best results with.
You can get it here: https://www.androidfilehost.com/?fid=23329332407583710

[phinc]

Also make sure that your server streams okay by streaming to another device (mobile phone or PC).