Kodi (Xbmc) - Improve Fast-forward Preview

I downloaded and installed Kodi yesterday and was pleased with how polished and well it also works on both android (Nexus 10) and my Ubuntu desktop.

However, if one fast-forwards for more than a few seconds, one may notice that the preview becomes "jerky", and one cannot accurately decide when to stop. This is probably because Kodi defaults to a very small cache size for tiny computers.

Running the following command in Linux will:

• cache in RAM rather than disk.
• increase the cache size to 50 MiB
• increase network utilization/speed for downloading content into the cache.

echo "<advancedsettings>
  <network>
    <buffermode>1</buffermode>
    <cachemembuffersize>52428800</cachemembuffersize>
    <readbufferfactor>10</readbufferfactor>
  </network>
</advancedsettings>" | tee $HOME/.kodi/userdata/advancedsettings.xml

Warning: Xbmc will actually use 3 times the cache size in RAM, so don't increase the number to something extremely large.

Windows and Other Users

User's who aren't using linux just need to create the text file called advancedsettings.xml with the following content:

<advancedsettings>
  <network>
    <buffermode>1</buffermode>
    <cachemembuffersize>52428800</cachemembuffersize>
    <readbufferfactor>10</readbufferfactor>
  </network>
</advancedsettings>

And place it in the relevant directory.

• Android - Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/.kodi/userdata/
• iOS - /private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/kodi/userdata/
• Mac OS X - /Users/<your_user_name>/Library/Application Support/kodi/userdata/
• OpenELEC - /storage/.kodi/userdata/
• Windows - %APPDATA%\kodi\userdata

References

• Kodi How-To: Modify the Video Cache
• Kodi - advancedsettings.xml