Stuttering playback of music and video
Oh no!
So, Mediaportal is all installed (at least in an initial sense…!) so I tried playing some of my music and a couple of .mkv files I’d had for a while. They worked, but every minute or two there was a horrible slowdown/stutter in the audio. It would last for maybe 4 seconds. Not a good start!
I spent a while playing around picking different audio outputs, checking for background processes and all sorts of other stuff, before turning to google.
Unfortunately, a problem like “random stuttering” leads to some pretty random results - however one thing that kept cropping up was wireless networks. In theory, this shouldn’t affect anything, but from what I read the auto-scan for new networks in Vista runs at a pretty high priority, so playback of media can suffer. To test the theory I disabled my wireless network card and tried again - playback was perfect!
Of course, I need a network connection to download the EPG, movie details, the weather…
I looked around some more. Some people had written batch files to disable the auto-scan feature without disabling the network device itself, and set these to start/stop with windows, and I was about to do this, when I found a simpler solution in the shape of http://www.martin-majowski.de/wlanoptimizer/downloads.php. This simple app autostarts with Windows, and configures the network card correctly to stop the stuttering. Problem solved!
