Hi Nikolay - Thanks for this thread :-)
I don't have problems when I just listen to a stream. The problems I reported appear when I try to connect to a stream or when I switch to another stream. The "awful stuttering" always comes up when MC is buffering web content... Normaly, the stuttering appears only for some seconds. But if the connection to a station gets lost (station going offline, less bandwith...) the stuttering is going on untill it's stopped manually. Sometimes MC displays "buffering", sometimes "waiting". But even if the stream comes back (and other programs play it again), MC won't stop stuttering... In some cases, MC crashes after a while without comment. When trying to reconnect to a "lost" station, MC crashes always. When trying to connect to a station that does not exist any more (IP/Port has changed / station offline), MC always crashes, sometimes after some seconds, sometimes immediately. If this happens, I have to use a backuped library to get MC to work again...
I tried to use Direct Sound, Wave Out and ASIO (if possible) as output for MC, but there was no difference. There were even no difference between the last ten builds of MC.
I compared it several times with MJ 8 and WinAmp (both with different outputs also) and they didn't showed these problems... both were muting seamless while buffering and didn't crashed when a station was "lost".
I made these comparisons on three machines:
The first one (my workstation) has a boot manager and for my testing and "developing" for MC I use a "fresh" image of a "clean" W2K installation which I copy over from time to time. This PC uses an Audigy PlatinumEX as soundcard.
My girlfriends "typewriter" is an older AMD 266 running NT4SP5 and uses an older Soundblaster.
My little fileserver is based on a VIA EPIA-M MiniITX board (667MHz) and uses the onboard digital output (I'm using a second one with the same board as livingroom PC, but I didn't tested MC on this one yet).
Here's the sysinfo of my "workstation"... If you think it's worth to post the sysinfo of the other machines, let me now :-)
-------------------------------------------
Media Center 9.1.246 -- C:\Programme\Audio\Media Center\
Microsoft Windows 2000 Workstation 5.0 Service Pack 2 (Build 2195)
Intel Pentium 4 2020 MHz MMX / Memory: Total - 1048 MB, Free - 712 MB
Internet Explorer: 6.0.2800.1106 / ComCtl32.dll: 5.81 / Shlwapi.dll: 6.00.2800.1226 / Shell32.dll: 5.00.3315.2902 / wnaspi32.dll: Internal ASPI Layer
Ripping / Drive I: Copy mode:ModeBurstBigBuffer CD Type:Auto Read speed:Max
Drive J: Copy mode:ModeBurstBigBuffer CD Type:Auto Read speed:Max
Digital playback: Yes / Use YADB: Yes / Get cover art: No / Calc replay gain: Yes / Copy volume: 32767
Eject after ripping: No / Play sound after ripping: No
Burning / Drive J: TEAC CD-W524E Addr: 1:1:0 Speed:24 MaxSpeed:24 BurnProof:Yes
Test mode: No / Eject after writing: Yes / Direct decoding: Yes / Write CD-Text: No
Use playback settings: No / Normalization: None
---------------------------------
P.S.: The machines are all running on the same LAN (not wireless) and are connected to the internet with a SMC Barricade DSL router. The LAN / internet connection offers enough bandwith to play four streams and more, the stuttering also appears when there's more than 50% bandwith available. I only use mp3 streams with 128k or more (no wma).
I hope there's a way to fix these problems