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Windows Forum / Windows Media / Player / August 2008Music playback skipping in Vista Ultimate 64-bit OS
I have posted this on the technet forum as well To take the short version first: When I play MP3/Wave from harddisk, the music starts skipping/jumping for one or two seconds as with a scratched CD every 10-15 minutes. The same story applies to playing DVD from the DVD-player, with a similar "skip" in the picture. The long version: Same problem of course ;-) System setup: Motherboard: ASUS Rampage Formula RAM: 4GB Geil CPU : intel Core2 Quad Q9450 2.66 GHz Initial soundcard: Soundblaster X-FI extreme music (Removed for now) Secondary (present) soundcard: ASUS additional PCIe soundcard Graphics card: XFX Nvidia Gforce 7950 GT Raid controller: Promise SuperTrak EX 4650 with currently three 750 GB Samsung SATA drives in a raid 5 configuration System disk (OS-installation): Western Digital Raptor 150GB (Not part of the raid) OS: Vista Ultimate 64-bit. To be honest, I would think this system should be able to handle the playback of MP3 rather effortless (the problem occurs even when Windows Media player is the only open application, but of course there are background processes). The steps I've been through: - The music that is played, is located in the Raid-drive, but the same problem occurs if copy the files to the system-disk. - The initial soundcard was the X-FI card from creative until I removed it, and installed the PCIe-card supplyed with the ASUS motherboard, so I don't think the problem resides in the soundcard-drivers (which both were up to date),unless i'ts a common problem ;-) - Went to Control Panel -> Sound -> Speakers -> Properties -> Enhancements -> and checked the "Disable all enhancements" checkbox (according to som forum suggestions) - removed MMCSS from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/AudioSrv/DependentOnService, and also disable the Service (made it start manually) - also a tip from some forum - The Wondows Colour appearance is set to Windows Vista Basic (not the seethrough stuff) - The powermanagement is set to never turn off (for the sake of science) - The powermanagement for the CPU is set to a stable high frequence in order to provide a stable capacity - I also tried to install a 3'rd party media player - J River Media Center - I also tried to install a Radeon Vista certified? graphics card just so that all components (read drivers) in the machine were new (and therefore the available drivers) - As far as I can tell, all the drivers are up to date - I also made the J River Media Center buffer 3 seconds of playback - slow response, but hoped for redused skipping None of the above changes made any noticeable impact on the behaviour And still, Donald Fagen sings with some enthusiasm: "What a b... b... b... b... be... be... be... be... beautiful world it will be ....", and I'm thinking - Yes, I really hope so ... ! I hope someone can help me on this matter. It would also be helpful to describe a way to identify the process or processes (I assume, in some way or the other) that makes an influence on this behaviour. However - I have used XP since it was released with none of this problem whatsoever, with a much higher load with a number of applications running, including an Oracle database in the "background". I'm reluctant to identify this as a hardware failure as well, since the rest of the system seems to be stable. Regards As any cell Phone or MP3 player proves, you don’t need much to play audio. Your system should be able to play multiple streams without problems. You have done much already so my suggestions might be a bit trivial - open the resource monitor, play and watch for processes doing a lot of I/O or consuming CPU - open the task manager and give WMP the highest priority This should tell you if it is a software related problem  Signaturehttp://thewelltemperedcomputer.com > I have posted this on the technet forum as well > [quoted text clipped - 68 lines] > > Regards Hi, thanks for your response! ... I'm not sure if I understand your conclusion :-) If i's an I/O process causing the skipping, is this then a hardware or sofware issue? I set the priority of the media player to Realtime and started the testing. I think it is difficult to pinpoint the process interrupting, but there seems to be a lot of I/o-ing going on, but not with a big amount of data I would say. There seems to be som logging going on: c:\windows\System32\Config\SYSTEM.LOG1 c:\windows\System32\LogFiles\Scm\SCM.EVM There also seems to be several searchindexer.exe processes running with piority Normal, which is the highes priroty used except for some svchost.exe processes There is also som activity on the Trend Micro antivirus program, but does not hit the log-view at the the skipping occurs. It is either present, or comes around after. The CPU-consumption is difficult to catch, since it is over at the blink of an eye. I'm not familiar with the use of logging with the resource monitor, but I guess this should provide information on CPU-load as well as timestamp for the events? Thanks again, Regards These problems are very hard to tackle. As you talk about 10-15 minutes interval, I assume it is some process peaking. But of course it could be anything. Do I understand correctly that setting WMP priority to real time didn't help? Check the event log maybe some error is reported there. Signaturehttp://thewelltemperedcomputer.com > Hi, > [quoted text clipped - 32 lines] > Thanks again, > Regards Yes, setting the WMP priority to Real time didn't help. I think you are right that there may be a process peaking ... and also discovered that some loggin gto the harddrive appears as I/O (among others a NTUSER.LOG1 and NTUSER.LOG2 placed on my c:\Users\<username> which sizes up to 250+ kb, the other one 0) I have used a lot of time investigating this reading different forums, updating drivers and so on, so my next step will be to install a clean installation of Vista again and step by step add the neccessary components to the system in order to make qualified guess at least on what the problem is. Still baffles me though that a quad cpu system cant perform better at an almost idle state Cheers! > These problems are very hard to tackle. > As you talk about 10-15 minutes interval, I assume it is some process [quoted text clipped - 39 lines] > > Thanks again, > > Regards Maybe you should try to disabling a couple of processes - networking - anti virus - raid so stopping services and device drivers untill you find the culprit. Good luck Signaturehttp://thewelltemperedcomputer.com > Yes, setting the WMP priority to Real time didn't help. > [quoted text clipped - 56 lines] > > > Thanks again, > > > Regards Thanks Vincent, I'll try that irst. I've checked out your homepage reference and see that you are into the ideas where my system in time should provide. I intend to set it up as a media server, hence the raid (both movie/photo/ music content), and still want it to perform in other areas as well (gaming and other performance demanding tasks). With the supposedly I/O problem/peaking process I have, will this also be a problem when streaming the music to another computer in the home network ? I know it's hypothetical, but still ;-) Regards > Maybe you should try to disabling a couple of processes > [quoted text clipped - 65 lines] > > > > Thanks again, > > > > Regards If there is a process choking all other ones (CPU and/or I/O) it will probably interrupt streaming audio to. If you happen to have another Vista box you can simply check, put media sharing on and start to play from the other machine and vis(t)a versa. Maybe it helps you to identify the problem to as streaming audio is a different mechanism. Nothing wrong with RAID, it prevents you against HD disasters but it won't prevent you against dropping the unit, water, fire, theft, etc. So make a backup anyway. I prefer remote replication. I have a (single disk) NAS at home and one at my sisters house. I synchronies my content over the internet to hers and she does the reverse. Sounds reasonably nuke proof to me. Signaturehttp://thewelltemperedcomputer.com > Thanks Vincent, I'll try that irst. > [quoted text clipped - 82 lines] > > > > > Thanks again, > > > > > Regards >... I'm not sure if I understand your conclusion :-) If i's an I/O process >causing the >skipping, is this then a hardware or sofware issue? Software going to disk and causing the entire system to lose it's place ? >I set the priority of the media player to Realtime and started the testing. >There also seems to be several searchindexer.exe processes running with >piority Normal, That would often do it according to the noted frequency of interruptions and depending on search depth settings. If you turn off vista's Indexing, does it magically go away ? It seems particularly resource intensive at startup on my 32 bit single CPU box, can't speak for a 4 core CPU though. HTH Cheers - Neil ------------------------------------------------ Digital Media MVP : 2004-2008 http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs Which enhancements were listed on that page, by the way? SignatureSpeaking for myself only. See http://zachd.com/pss/pss.html for some helpful WMP info. This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. -- >I have posted this on the technet forum as well > [quoted text clipped - 78 lines] > > Regards |
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