My system should be more than capable of handling XBMC on Windows 8. Here are the specs:
AMD A6-5400K (built in HD 7540D)
MSI FM2-A75MA-E35
8GB Patriot G2 Series Division DDR3 @ 9-9-9-24 (2 x 4GB)
64GB Crucial M4 CT064M4SSD2 (Boot)
Toshiba HDKPC08 3TB SATA3 7200RPM 32MB Cache (Storage)
Apex DM-387 mATX HTPC Case w/ 275W PSU
Every now and then my system will give a 5 second stutter in sound and video playback that sounds something like this "bzz-bzz-bzz" while watching movies. It also did this with my Acer Aspire R1600 which was one of the reasons that I upgraded my HTPC. I am not connected to a network drive, my storage drive is inside my HTPC case. I am also running the latest build of XBMC Frodo 12.2.
Any ideas what might be causing it? Thanks,
Humm... the way you say it "Every now and then" indicates it's not reproducible enough that a debug log would be useful? Considering this symptom was also noticed on your Acer Aspire R1600 would have me looking for common denominators between the systems, the first to come to mind is the media itself (bad encodes, or errors in the files, oddball codecs), then any hardware that is/was used in both systems like the drives themselves. Might come down to a cable or bad handshaking on the same display.
Failing that; using the keybaord 'o' command while watching a film will give the an idea of how close to the edge your system is in performance.
This may not match your problem exactly, but I’ll past it anywayz.
I used to have these two problems.
1: Random audio/video stutter when watching a Blu-ray ISO, accompanied by a loud noise (bzzz-bzz-bzzz) that lasted 2-3 seconds and recurred frequently. How frequently, depends on the computers energy saving settings.
I solved it by turning of the timer that saves energy by stopping the hard drives from spinning. Apparently the stutter came from some type of electricity surge when the hard drives began to spin again. This probably happened after XBMC came to the end of the stored data in the RAM and needed to retrieve more data from the hard drive(?).
If you have Windows you should go to Start menu => Control panel => Hardware and Sound => Power Options => click on "Change plan settings" => click on "Change advanced power settings" => click on "Hard disk" => click on "Turn of hard disk after" => set it to "Never" => click "OK" at the bottom.
2: Buffering issues when watching a Blu-ray ISO from two of my hard drives, but not from my other hard drives. Eventually I realized that the buffering was due to the fact that these two hard drives where connected to a 4x PCI-E card
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/U3S6 that had two SATA 3 ports.
This card was supposed to speed things up, instead it did the opposite. I don't know why, but it was the cause of the buffering problem. I connected the hard drives to SATA 2.0 ports on the main motherboard and the buffering problem stopped.
This won't solve everyone's problems, but could be helpful in specific circumstances. I have reposted in different threads incase it could be useful to someone.
(W7, AMD Radeon HD 6450, Xonar Essence ST, Onkyo receiver, Sony projector, Eden and Transparency! 4.x)