INTERACT FORUM
More => Old Versions => Media Center 16 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: dogleg867 on September 26, 2011, 08:00:58 pm
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I've recently been having a most distressing problem with MC. It only happens when I run Full System Scans on Norton. If I happen to be streaming music from MC, which is usually the case, frequent dropouts will occur. By "frequent", I mean 2-5 or more times in just a single song. They last for about 5 to 10 seconds and then resume play until the next drop out. Pausing or stopping the scan immediately fixes the problem, but these are 2 operations that I would like to (and SHOULD) be able to perform at the same time. I really don't think this is an issue of having inadequate computing power: I have a Windows 7 64bit HPE 270f with Core i7 processor and 12 GB RAM. My conjecture is that the scan is accessing files on the hard drive that are allocated near the file that is playing. I recently installed a new PSU, added 4 GB RAM, and installed a 240 GB SSD. The drop outs seemed to start about the same time as these upgrades. Again, I don't think that it is related, but it might be worth mentioning. Has anyone else noted this or similar problems, and could anyone recommend a solution?
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That's a problem with the virus scanner, not with MC. It's probably keeping the drive so busy that the track can't be read fast enough.
Try setting the virus scanner to ignore whatever you can. There is no reason to scan every file.
Their web site might be helpful.
The CPU and RAM of your machine are great, but won't help if it's disk bound.
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I haven't used Norton. I've been using Microsoft Security Essentials. I assume Norton has the ability to set file locations and processes to exclude from scans?
I have MSE configured to exclude the "Program Files\J River" folders from scans. I have it set to exclude the "Media Center 16.exe" process. I also have it set to exclude my music library folder. My music files are from files I've ripped myself. They're not going to be infected by anything. There is no need for a virus checker to be monitoring file access, reads, or writes to my music files. Monitoring those files and processes is just going to get in the way of MC being able to quickly and consistently access files.
So try similar exclusions in Norton and see what happens.
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I have Norton and it's a pain.
Until I figured out what was going on I used to get major stuttering and dropouts when watching a movie after exactly 10 min of play. Then I realised that Norton was kicking in after 10 min of 'idle time' to do 'idle time processes' or scans or whatever. If I kept twiddling the mouse every 9.5 minutes playback would be smooth.
There are options in Norton to set a delay for the idle time stuff before it kicks in, I've now set this to the max (only 30 min though IIRC). If you right click in the tray icon for Norton, I think there's an option to temporarily disable it too, one of the options is disable until next restart IIRC.
I think when this years subscription runs out I'll look for an alternative.
SBR
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I think when this years subscription runs out I'll look for an alternative.
Don't bother waiting until then. Many of the free options out there are better (MSE, Avast, AVG, plenty more probably). There's no sense in sticking with the inferior Norton just because you paid for it already.
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I should also say that MSE wasn't causing any problems for me with music playback in MC. There wasn't a need to do the exclusions. I just did cause it's an easy tweak that may help to avoid potential problems or interference with music playback.
My music computer is old. Just an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200. Just two cores. No powerhouse by current CPU standards. It is working fine. A modern i3, i5 or i7 should easily be able to handle MC along with an anti-virus program running. If an AV program is causing audio glitches or other problems in MC on an i7 then the AV software is a serious resource pig and you should switch to an AV program that isn't such a pig.
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Try Tools > Options > Audio > Settings & tick > Play files from memory instead of disk (Not zone specific)
If its still not working with this setting although I could be wrong, it should rule out hard drive access rates..