[TRaSH]

Strange that the "buggy realtek drivers" work great with EDEN, but not with FRODO. Thic seams to be a video decoding issue (ffmpeg?) Could we just have a option to chose the video decoder (old Eden vs. new Frodo style)?

eden didn't support bitstreaming,
and there're several people who reported that they have issues with the realtek drivers
Taken from the wiki

2.1.1 ATI/AMD
If using WASAPI do not use the Realtek HD Audio drivers as they do not work with the event driven mode XBMC uses for WASAPI. To use WASAPI you must use the AMD High Definition Audio drivers.
The Realtek HD Audio drivers will however work with the Directsound mode.

[bluray]

What buggy Realtek? With proper hardware and configurations, Realtek work fine with optical/coax using WASAPI in Frodo. If you are trying to configure it for bitstreaming DTS-HD/TrueHD, you want to use GPU driver instead. You can find tips and screenshots of Frodo in this thread- Simplify XBMC configurations......

If you haven't update the latest AMD driver, you can update it from here- AMD Driver Autodetect.....

[Galactus]

I gave up on the problem, but I will look into it again when I get home. I have Frodo running on an OpenElec box <ver 2.99.2> (Acer Revo), and an i3 Windows 7 machine both in my living room. The buffering only occurs on the Windows box. I read about some issues with having Realtek audio drivers installed on the windows machine. I will uninstall those if they exist. However, I don't encounter any audio related issues, no jutter, macroblocking, or pixelation. I just buffer every 30 seconds or so. Anyway, I will give that a go. Also, I am using NFS shares, I'll try SMB and see if there is a difference.

I'm streaming all of my media from an Unraid machine over ethernet. I've been using the same Star Trek Blue ray MKV on both systems for my testing.

[Londave]

Okay..I've updated to the latest AMD drivers (13.1 I believe), switched to WASAPI and the buffering is no better -- might be worse. Same machine, same video plays fine with VLC. Movie is being served from a NAS on a wired network.
Anyone have any other ideas?

[DDDamian]

Windows works best with SMB shares.

[wes paich]

there's a post about sound settings that may relate to your problem.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=146911