After a long time away,  I have returned to BBC iPlayer. Unfortunately, they seem to have changed things and that is causing me some problems.

When I try to play a BBC stream using the Kodi iPlayer add-on on Android (Nvidia Shield), it works fine for a short time, up to about 10 minutes, then it starts buffering, sometimes only a little but gradually more and more until it is almost constant. The stream pauses, starts, pauses, buffers and sometimes the audio disappears but the video returns. This gets worse and worse and it doesn’t recover. If I pause it, the playback sometimes works for a few seconds, but almost immediately starts choking again.

The iPlayer streams now play at maximum resolution by default. When playing on a browser, the gear setting can be used to reduce resolution to prevent buffering. With Kodi, this setting is overlaid by the add-on that gives different options for changing the bit rate and other things, but nothing seems to help. 

However, I have no playback issues on my laptop browser and I can reduce the resolution if necessary. Casting seems an obvious solution here but I have also had problems with casting the BBC tab and I can only cast the desktop, which gives poor quality. 

This brings me to my question. Why do I have playback issues on the Shield, when the browser works fine? Is there any solution to this problem? My download speeds are usually constant at 29 Mbps, and never much less than 20 Mbps. I think this should be sufficient. It almost seems like something is clogging the Shield, to put it in plumbing terms. Does anyone else see this? Does anyone know what might be at fault here?