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Debugging choppy WMC recorded TV playback

post #1 of 4
3/10/13 at 10:01am
Thread Starter 
I bought a new Gateway computer to replace my aging and now defunct Dell Zino as my main WMC computer. I believe I set up the Gateway the same as I set up the Dell. The Gateway is much more responsive than the Dell for many things, such as selecting menus and paging through the TV channels. However, the Gateway periodically (basically daily now) encounters a problem where recorded TV has a horrible choppy playback once you select and then start to play back a show. It's not watchable. If I then reboot the computer, the same show will play back flawlessly. I'm now rebooting the computer daily if not twice a day. Meanwhile, although recorded TV is choppy, regular TV (delivered from either HD homerun or homerun prime) is perfectly fine.

How do I go about debugging choppy recorded TV playback (where the video is choppy immediately after selecting a recorded TV show and only gets better upon reboot of the computer)?

Thank you,
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post #2 of 4
3/23/13 at 6:52am
Thread Starter 
No one has any suggestions? I keep having to reboot the computer to play WMC WTV files. I had to reboot this morning. I had choppy video, so I rebooted, selected the exact same WTV file, and it played perfectly. I never had this problem with my Dell.
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post #3 of 4
3/23/13 at 7:56am
A few things to look at. First is to add the folder where you store recorded TV to the exclusion list of any and all antivirus programs you have running. This includes Windows defender and windows security essentials (which you have depends on your OS version). No need to scan those programs when you play them back. Second is to go into the device manager (start - right click my computer - properties, select device manager or right click the lower left where the metro screen is located and select device manager). Go to hard drives, right click you drive, select policies and ensure write caching is turned on.
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post #4 of 4
3/23/13 at 2:48pm
I see this happen occasionally and each time I discovered that another program was writing to my drive and taking up all of its throughput. After a couple of minutes it would stop. It turned out to be SABnzbd+ unpacking material to that same drive that I keep most content on. I solved the issue by assigning SABnzbd+ some temp space on an SSD.

It could be any program doing it though ... as the previous poster suggested.
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