Regular stuttering (used to work fine)

Hi all,

I've been using Serviio for probably two years now, and have been thrilled with it. So thrilled that I decided to re-invest a little in my Serviio "server" and upgrade its memory, hard drive space, OS (from Windows XP to Windows 7), and buy a license for Serviio Pro. I did this all a few weeks ago.

And then the problems started.

I have both a Sony KDL60EX720 TV and a Sony BDP-S580 BluRay player located in different rooms. (All my A/V is Sony, but those are the DLNA devices). I had the S580 for probably a year before I got the EX720, and rarely had issues with it that weren't driven by my PC's inability to transcode in real-time, so I generally pre-transcode everything I have to h264@4.1 profile and ~5 Mbps and AC3 @ 320 kbps so that my PC (which is really old) only has to remux the stream to M2TS. The only thing I don't routinely do is re-encode AC3 to AC3 just because of bitrate. I mention this because even with pre-transcoding to an appropriate format -- which generally played fine on my BDP, the EX720 often has issues with stuttering -- seemingly after pausing for any reason -- so I've learned to live with these limitations.

The problem is that since this upgrade, basically none of my videos play back on either device without stuttering every 2-3 seconds, making the material unwatchable. (The movies often play for a few minutes without any stuttering, but then stutter constantly). I've watched my PC while it's remuxing and have confirmed that it does remux in minutes (probably ~10-15 minutes for a full-length movie) which seems to me to be slower than it used to be, but certainly way faster than real-time. During that time my CPU is at 10-20% utilization, network is at 5% utilization (everything in my setup has a wired ethernet connection), and RAM is steady at 33% utilization and not paging.

I'm hoping for some help figuring out what the issue is. The most drastic change in my setup seems to me to be the switch from Windows XP to Windows 7, and I suppose it's possible that Windows is somehow throttling things, but I'm not sure what that could be or what I could do about it.

I'm at a total loss and any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Sorry I didn't figure this out sooner, but I thought I would post about it in case someone else has a similar problem.

I noticed that Serviio was working fine with low-quality (300 kbps) videos, and since I knew my issue wasn't CPU (I wasn't transcoding) and I thought I was well within the limits of what my devices could decode (I think I've read here that Sony BDP's should be able to play 20-30 Mbps streams without an issue) I figured there had to be some limiting factor on my "server" -- either network or drive.

I'll skip the chain of logic that led me to try it, but I decided to change the location of Serviio's transcoding folder (which is also the muxing folder) to a different drive, and that fixed my problem. I'm not sure why that would be the case -- I used to run Serviio with only drive and never had any problems -- so I'm going to have to do some diagnostics on my new drive to try and figure out if I have a larger issue.

Anyway, I appear to be back up and running now, if not a little perplexed.