The toddler loves having Kodi full of all their faves but I haven’t been able to iron out all the buffering I’m getting streaming from my mini-pc NFS mounted shares to the pi4 libreelec hooked up via Ethernet in the living room. Everything is wired, so I wouldn’t think that would be an issue but here I am about to put down a couple hundred dollars for a Synology router that looks like the monolith from 2001. Is this going to do the trick, you think? Is there another router recommended to keep a distributed little homelab (any 10tb spread between various usb hdd, raspberry pi’s and mini PCs all hosting a variety of containers and services) running smoothly? Budget I’m hoping to keep under 300 and lower the better but happy toddler and buttery smooth streaming over lan is the priority.
In my living room, buffering happens when the connection is only WiFi, but you are on ethernet already (which solves that for me).
Have you considered getting one of these small Chinese “Android TV” boxes?
Please do not buy cheap no brand android tv boxes unless you know how to verify they are not running malware out of the box. This is a known problem and shouldn’t be recommended.
So why don’t you tell us how to verify that?
First result searching “how to check if android tv is infected”: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/thousands-of-android-tv-boxes-infected-with-dangerous-malware-linked-to-fraud
You can’t and they are almost certainly preinfected