Android TV (Sony Bravia) frequent caching despite advanced settings

My Sony Bravia is connected to my home LAN network via my electrical mains. It works well, streaming services are fine at 1080p and higher, and although it’s not blistering I can play a high quality video with no issues with VLC, the built in video player and as I discovered last night, with PLEX.

I also used to be able to do so with Kodi v16.x, although I needed to do a little bit of tweaking to advancedsettings.xml to increase my buffer size and read rate. This worked a treat and continued to do so for HD movies as well as SD content right up until earlier this month when v17 dropped.

All of a sudden the frequent buffering started again and so I figured that I needed to re-create the advances settings file. I noted that there are changes in this version to the XML nodes, so I ensured that I was doing the changes correctly.

However, absolutely nothing I do changes anything. HD and SD content alike struggles over wifi as well as LAN, my buffer read rate varied from 1 up to 50 (ridiculous, I know) and my cache size is more than 100MB which is more than enough.

Despite testing several arrangements of numbers, nothing seemed to really change. It would cache inconsistently – sometimes a minute or two would pass before buffering happened, sometimes only 20 seconds. It would be the same no matter whether it was low bitrate SD content or significantly higher bitrate content in 1080p. My network capacity is sufficient for at least the SD content to be fine, but this is not relevant because streaming from the same source using 3 other apps on the TV do not have this problem.

Is this a known issue? Does anyone have any thoughts?

I would much rather use Kodi than Plex, but I can’t deal with buffering every 30 to 120 seconds.