I have been having an issue for a very long time where when watching movies through Windows 7 Media Center (using MyMovies plugin), the video playback and audio sometimes will randomly freeze for 20-30 seconds or so.  After that time the audio resumes but the video starts to play in slow motion as if it is "waiting" for the audio to catch up.  Once the audio catches up to the current position of the video, everything goes back to normal and playback continues.

 

I've seen may others in various forums using HTPCs have similar issues and nobody can seem to find a solution for it.  I am thinking that it has something to do with unRAID but I cannot figure out what, if anything.  I've had various builds of my HTPC on different hardware and all have had the same issue so I don't think it's the Windows 7 HTPC.  I thought it might be disks spinning up on unRAID so I disabled them from spinning down and that didn't help.  It happened again last night and I checked the syslog and it doesn't show anything for the time that the freeze occurred.

 

The freezing issue is completely random - sometimes I get through several movies and it doesn't freeze at all.  When it does happen, the time at which it freezes is also completely random - it could be a few minutes into the movie, halfway through, etc.

 

My server and unRAID box are on a solid gigabit network.  All cabling is good.  Ping times are 1ms and never drop.  No applications or processes are running on the win7 box during playback and no other PC is accessing data on the unRAID box and there is no parity check, etc. going on.  Just the movie playback and that's it.

 

I am running unRAID 4.7

 

Is anyone else having this issue that might be able to help me figure out what might be causing it?

 

In the past I have had zero issues, but over the last two days I have been experiencing the same issue. I am using 5.0rc8

Are both the server and the client pc set up with static ip addresses? In my case, whenever one of the two negotiated a new lease with the dhcp server (router), media playback would stop (Depending on the router it happens every so many hours, in my case it was every 12 hours starting from when the original lease was obtained).

 

After setting up static ip's for both machines on the router, there is no more lease negotiation and no more cutting out.

I am having the same issue.  Did the proposed solution worked for you?

The problem is not with UnRaid, but rather with the MyMovies taskbar program.  Does a number of background operations which winds up opening movies/tv shows seemingly at random.  And because of how Windows and SMB operates, all streams will be paused until that file winds up opening.

 

There are a couple of things which you can do to mitigate the problem.

 

- Don't setup any videos or music with WMC or WMP at all that are stored on the server, as WMP will run in the background and constantly check for changes / additions, etc.

 

- Leave the drives all spun up (as you've said you are), but also install cache_dirs so that UnRaid can find the files much easier when MyMovies asks for them.

 

- Disable the MyMovies taskbar program from loading up.  As long as your HTPC is not the MyMovies server, you will be safe doing this, but Binnerup does recommend against it.

 

Or, the route which I took:  Forget MyMovies all together and switch to XBMC.  I was really trying to avoid doing this as I had managed to build up ~30,000 points with MyMovies, but ultimately this was the best approach to take for me.