Yeah, I'm really starting to think this is a Win7 issue as well.  I wonder if a $40 upgrade to Windows 8 will make these anomalies go away?

Years ago when CPU and available computer memory was much more limited, those folks, who absolutely had to have all of the available resources of thier computer available 100% of the time, would permanently turn off many Windows services.  (Typically, these folks were hard-core gamers or video editing folks.)  Here are link to a couple of sites which provide  some insight into which services can be turned off:

 

      http://www.jasonn.com/turning_off_unnecessary_services_on_windows_xp

                        and

      http://www.blackviper.com/windows-services/

 

Be very careful when turning a service completely off, some can virtually 'brick' a computer.  However, these sites will provide you with the tools to help you find the culprit(s) that is/are giving you your problem.  Just use them with care.  (Stopping the wrong process with Task Manager can do the do the same thing and I bet you have used that with a second thought.)

 

Final thought for now, you have turned off File Content Indexing on each of your hard drives?  You can find this check box on the 'General' Tab of the Properties window for each hard drive in your system.  This 'feature' can be a real resource hog. 

Just adding my two cents here .. I'm experiencing this as well.  Seems as if when I first start a video file, I will hit these "pauses" and stutters within the first 60 seconds of playing.  After about 5 minutes or so, the issue goes away though.  My Win7 HTPC hasn't changed configuration in years but I have relatively recently upgraded my unraid box to ver 5.0 rc8 and is running virtually under ESXi.

 

I figured it was an issue with spinning up the idle disks under ESXi but haven't spent much time diagnosing this.  This very well cold be a Win7 issue as this problem did not occur within  the first month that I had upgraded unraid to ver 5

So just to update everyone who has been following this thread - I *may* have found a solution but I will need to do some further testing.

 

I did the upgrade to Win8, however that did not fix the problem.  (oh well, at least my OS is current now!)

 

Windows 8 however has a much better task manager with excellent graphs showing CPU, network and disk utilization.  I was monitoring all of these very closely during video playback.  I found that CPU stayed low all the time, so it was not a processing issue.  Disk utilization never peaked above 50% so it wasn't disk related either.  On the network side however, I did see that whenever the video froze, the network transfer speed dropped to zero for the duration of the pause.  Then, when the video started to resume, the bandwidth shot up to 30+ MB/s - trying to catch up and re-buffer the video content.

 

I have no explanation as to why the network transfer just stops all of a sudden like that.  During normal video playback, it streams just fine, depending on the video type, anywhere from 5-12MB/s.  I started to get suspicious of Windows media player and found a setting under options on the performance tab about buffering.  The default is to let WMP manage the buffer.  I set this to manual and after some experimentation I have found that setting it to manually buffer 20 seconds of content, the freezes seem to have gone away.  Setting it lower did not help, and setting it higher (like 60 seconds) was too much and slowed down rewind/ffw actions.

 

I'm going to continue to test this to see if this indeed has solved the problem to prove once and for all that this is a Windows issue and not a network or unRAID issue.

Bad news... my "fix" did not fix the problem at all.  Same thing as before.  Video freezes at random times during movie playback, sometimes 5 or 6 times now in the same movie.  Every time the video freezes if I look at the network connection graph, it shows that the network activity has completely dropped.  After 10-20 seconds the network activity will resume and the video will start to stutter as it tries to play catch up to the audio.

 

I've tried two different NICs in the HTPC to rule that out and still no change.  The network connection itself stays up all the time.

 

Can anyone suggest anything else I can monitor during move playback to help determine why the data randomly stops streaming temporarily from the unraid box to my HTPC?

Just to eliminate it as a problem, as suggested with VLC, try a different front-end.

 

I would suggest XBMC, and watch a number of movies through it and see if you still get the delays.

 

I run Win7 32bit, and have run both 4.7 and 5rc without delay problems for hundreds of movies. 

 

As an aside, I switched to XBMC from WMC + MyMovies and am so glad I did, no more fighting with codecs or other Windows issues.

Bad news... my "fix" did not fix the problem at all.  Same thing as before.  Video freezes at random times during movie playback, sometimes 5 or 6 times now in the same movie.  Every time the video freezes if I look at the network connection graph, it shows that the network activity has completely dropped.  After 10-20 seconds the network activity will resume and the video will start to stutter as it tries to play catch up to the audio.

 

I've tried two different NICs in the HTPC to rule that out and still no change.  The network connection itself stays up all the time.

 

Can anyone suggest anything else I can monitor during move playback to help determine why the data randomly stops streaming temporarily from the unraid box to my HTPC?

 

From your previous testing of large files to and from the unRAID server, you seem to have satisfied yourself that everything is working fine with the server, the network, and the basic IO functions of the HTPC.  That only leaves the actual 'player' software as the most likely source of the problem.  It would appear that it is not properly handling its internal buffer correctly and is allowing it to empty before it 'realizes' that  it has to request more data from the server.  (The data receiving application controls all requests for data.  The server provides one packet of data for each request.  If I recall correctly, this is 1500 bits! So it can take a while to move a large block of data.)  It then compounds the problem by restarting playback before it has all of its ducks in order.  (It should be waiting until it gotten enough data to properly sync video and audio before starting playback.  What is another second compared to aggravation of stuttering playback?)

 

Have you checked to see if there are any updates to your player software?  If there haven't been any updates for a while, it should be a sign, not of stability, but of abandonment.  I think you really need to be thinking about moving to another player platform.  However, it is my contention that there is not a 'perfect' player software or system.  They all have problems and issues.  You just pick the one where those issues don't effect you.  (I have the Netgear NTV-550 players on my system and a quick search would show you that it has many, many issues.  However, most of them don't effect our use or are easily surmounted by the technically inclined...    ) 

Some time has gone by and I've had a chance to test this situation even more.  It turns out that drive spin-up (or something related to it) on the unRAID server actually DOES seem to be the culprit.

 

Even though I have my split level set correctly and all of my individual movies are stored on the same physical drive (not that it would matter anyway since each movie is just a single .mkv file), for some reason, unless I have ALL of the drives in my unRAID box spun up, the video freezing is almost guaranteed to happen.  If I first go into the unRAID console and click the button to spin up all drives and then start watching the movie, it plays fine.

 

Here's an interesting observation:  I have my default disk spin down delay set to 1 hour currently.  I just finished watching a movie after first spinning up all of the drives.  The movie was almost 2 hours long so in theory, at the end of the movie, only one drive in the array should be left spinning.  What I found is that only 4 out of my 9 data drives had spun down, the rest are all still active!  This kind of behaviour is pretty consistent.

 

This doesn't make any sense of course since the movie is only stored on one drive!  Nothing else is accessing the unRAID box while I am watching a movie.  Could this be a bug?  I'm on version 4.7.  I really don't want to have all of the drives spinning all of the time... waste of power and also a lot of unnecessary wear and tear on the drives...

 

Any thoughts... Limetech?

Is the share spread over the spinning disks? Could the player be looking for a directory or some meta-data?

No, the entire movie folder resides on the same physical disk.

Attach a syslog that includes a stuttering event.

That's another problem... when I have the freezes, I don't see anything in the syslog at all, not even anything showing disks spinning up.  All I know is that if all of the disks in the array are spinning, I never get the issue.

this is how how i fixed this problem

 

edit with admin

 

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\lmhosts

 

add at the bottom

 

192.168.1.121  Tower #PRE

 

If that fixes your problem, then it implies an underlying networking issue doing lookup of network names on the local LAN.