This is the first question to answer, before you touch any setting. If a single channel freezes but the rest play fine, the fault sits with that one stream on the source side, and no Kodi setting fixes it because the problem never reached your device in the first place. If an entire group goes dark while other groups load fine, the add-on's connection to that specific group failed, which is narrower than a full outage. If the whole guide is blank or every channel buffers, the problem is your playlist link, the add-on itself, or your connection path, not one stream. Three different faults need three different fixes, so scope the failure honestly before you change a single setting or restart anything.

Change to a different channel, wait a few seconds, then switch back. If the original channel plays clean again, the session had stalled and your bandwidth was never the actual issue, no matter how it looked in the moment. Live IPTV arrives as short segments, roughly 6 seconds each, and a stall longer than what Kodi has buffered shows up on screen as a visible freeze even on a fast connection. Switching channels forces the add-on to open a fresh session instead of waiting on the stuck one. This test takes about ten seconds and tells you more about the real cause than restarting your router ever will.

Kodi updates its own internal API with major version releases, and a live TV add-on built against the older API can stop loading channels, lose its saved settings, or crash on launch right after you update. This is a distinct, recurring cause that shows up after nearly every major Kodi release, not a one-off glitch tied to your setup. Check the add-on's repository page for a matching update before you assume your playlist expired or your account changed. If no update is available yet, staying on your current Kodi version until one lands is often the faster and less frustrating fix than chasing settings that were never the problem.

Two changes help more than anything else: set the live TV buffer mode as low as Kodi allows instead of a large fixed cache, and switch your device's DNS resolver to a public one in network settings. Player apps also hold the full channel list in memory, and lists above roughly 18,000 visible entries start to destabilize on modest hardware, so hiding unused groups is a real fix, not a cosmetic one. Some buffering is oversold server capacity on the provider's side, and no Kodi setting reaches that no matter how carefully you tune it. If buffering keeps recurring across a connection that streams everything else cleanly, ask what uptime the service actually commits to in writing.

1. 1Set live TV buffer to minimum, not maximum
2. 2Switch to a public DNS resolver
3. 3Hide unused channel groups to lighten the loaded list