2012-01-03, 14:43
I have a great little HTPC that does everything I need it to except from time to time I have a strange problem with buffering that makes a movie unwatchable. I am streaming all my content from a windows xp machine that has 3 external hard drives attached. I am using SAMBA via hardwired connection. I have checked on the windows xp machine that all of the folders I want to share have the correct permissions and accessing them via XBMC is no problem at all. For some reason though I have a random problem with buffering so bad that the movie is unwatchable as it will pause, buffer taking up to a minute then play only a few seconds before buffering again. I would say that about 90% of the time my movies all play fine, 1080p,720p no problems for most movies but then once in a while this buffer problem appears out of the blue. I was watching a movie that was 3 hours long with no problems, then I was watching a movie that was about 2 hours long and it made it until the last 30 minutes and began buffering. Rebooting had no affect, sometimes the buffering would get so bad the movie just stopped and returned to XBMC. In that scenario both movies were on the same hard drive but last night I had a problem with buffering from the start of a movie so I copied it over to another hard drive and the movie played fine with no buffering problems. I checked both drives and shared folders and the permissions are identical so I'm not sure what could be causing this problem, anyone have any ideas?
