SadPotato

So it has been a while but I have done some troubleshooting. Completely reinstalled Windows 11 (did not just do an in-place upgrade), made sure to grab the latest 23H2 and all the updates. (Issue persisted.) Reinstalled Unraid, completely deleted (before backing up) my USB and started from scratch. Rebuilt the parity drives and restored all of my data. I was going to do this anyway as I wanted to clear up the mess I made of Docker and other settings due to beginner ignorance. (Issue persisted.) Made an entirely new share, copied test files over from the old share. (Issue persisted.) Verified network was set to private. Tried both 40Gbe fiber line and standard 1Gbe ethernet line. (Issue persisted.) Also I switched out my two smallest drives (an 8TB and 12TB) for 18TB drives. Those became my parity drives and the others were shifted down to standard data drives. I also have a 1TB NVME Cache drive instead of my old 500GB SATA one. Nothing seems to be fixing the issue. Its gotten to the point where I am contemplating switching OS's entirely.

I tried it on my personal laptop running Windows 10, as well as a work laptop running Windows 10. Both were running on slower Wifi and both managed to play videos without a hitch using less than a gigabit connection. Strangely enough, I have a Surface Pro running a VERY old Windows 11 Insider build (based on 21H2, and installed July 2021) and very old copy of VLC, and it seems to have no problems as well. I don't think its some kind of speed issue, considering (old) Windows Media Player works on 11 after a lot of loading. It feels like some kind of negotiation issue between Windows 11 and however my Unraid server is configured.

The problem is that I have tried googling it. I've made reddit threads, everything. I can't find anyone having a similar issue or any kind of solution that works.

If I copy the file back to the computer, it works just fine. Its only when attempting to run it from the network share. The files got there through a variety of ways. Plain ol copy and paste, YoutubeDLP, etc... All seem to have the same results. I have just run the New Permissions tool with no success. I did test this on a Windows 10 machine and found no issues playing back video files over slower 2.4Ghz wifi.

Ever since me (and my mother) upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11, I have had strange issues with my SMB shares. For example, I cannot load any video or audio files directly off of the share UNLESS its through Windows Media Player, and only after it takes about 10-20 seconds to load. Using VLC, MPC-BE/HC, all causes them to immediately open and then crash. Except with VLC, where if I open it beforehand and drag the file over to the player, it will work (but only for shorter, smaller files) I have also noticed that if I attempt to open a picture file from the SMB share, windows picture viewer crashes and takes the entire explorer.exe process with it. This behaviour has been beyond annoying to me and I can't seem to find anyone else running into these issues. I thought it was just because I have a weird 40GbE direct connection over fibre to my PC, but that wouldn't explain the similar issues my mother ran into, and doesn't explain the fact that the same issues crop up using plain old gigabit ethernet.