I have a question that is kinda related to What's the best media server solution for RPi4 for remote watching?, but my concerns/requirements are a bit different.
Basically, I have a RPI 4 Model B (2 GB version) and have had some success with getting PiHole, Samba and MiniDLNA to all work well together. By this I mean that the Pi seems to mostly handle all of these services running concurrently, but with a major caveat.
I use Kodi on my Xbox One to connect to the MiniDLNA server and stream media from an old USB 2.0 drive that's connected to the Pi. It does have its own power supply, but the older USB standard could be causing bottlenecks, since the streaming experience on my Xbox is less than ideal.
If I start watching a media file (MKV's in particular) and just leave it going, all is well and transcoding/streaming happens seamlessly. But if I miss something due to an interruption, and want to rewind a few seconds (which happens a lot), this causes buffering issues whereby the video will turn mostly-green for up to 10 seconds, while the audio continues playing normally.
This is extremely annoying to the point where I'm considering a complete revamp of my entire setup - even though it took days of painstaking research and fiddling to get even this level of semi-seamless streaming.
From the research I've done over the past couple of hours, I really think that the main culprit is RPI OS Buster's lack of support for 64-bit processes. I find it ludicrous that the official and recommended OS for RPI's is still lacking solid support for the processor within the latest generations, but nevertheless, I feel as though my best chance for avoiding potential setup headaches is to stick with the officially-supported OS (please correct me if I'm wrong!).
This article gives me hope that most of the bugs with full 64-bit support have been ironed out in the May 2021 release, but they do mention problems with VLC hardware acceleration:
Below is the current list of known issues with the build. The biggest user-facing issue is the lack of hardware video acceleration in VLC or Chromium. You can expect these both to struggle when dealing with heavy websites or media files.
Would that particular issue effect my use of MiniDLNA/Kodi? If so, can anyone suggest a setup that they've used to reliably stream media in a similar fashion to what I've described? MTIA and apologies for the wall of text! :-)
