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[StFeder]

(No bug, nothing to complain about, just an astonishing happening)

Sometimes I use my Laptop for DJing at a ballroom lesson. For this, I only need it as a kind of jukebox. So I created a hardware profile with only very few services (the essential ones) running under Windows XP Professional. And it’s only MC which needs to be open. To be absolutely sure that nothing can disturb MC, I set the process priority to “high” via Taskmanager.

In very rare cases the playback skips. Last weekend I had one small skip again and so I decided to set the task priority to “realtime”, because nothing else is running so MC can have the (little) power my Laptop can provide. After doing this, every time I switch a view in MC or type a search, playback skips. Looks as if my settings make MC steal the audio playback service (or whatever is needed for a proper playback) all the resources.

In the end I set the priority back to normal (perhaps I’ll choose “above normal” for the future lessons… not sure).  No skipping

I thought it would be the best choice to give the application I really need the top priority, but I was wrong.

Because it was surprising me, I guess it’d be worth to post.

[hit_ny]

What format is the media in and what is the spec of your laptop ?

[Matt]

Media Center already sets the core playback thread to time critical, which is the highest thread priority.  If you boost the other threads in the program they'll start to compete with the playback thread.

Increasing buffering in Options > Playback will cause MC to give more data to the playback subsystem you are using (DirectSound, ASIO, etc.) and could help in these cases.

However, often a hiccup is a hardware level thing that no amount of software changes would help.

[StFeder]

I've got an IBM ThinkPad R40 with 256 MB Ram and 1,3 GHz Pentium M (I'm not sure with the prozessor). I'm playing mp3s. I don't think that there is something wrong with MC, because it works just fine if priority is set to "normal". There is no skipping if I use it this way. But I was afraid that under some circumstances there may possible some skipping and to prevent this, I set the "Media Center 12.exe" priority to a higher level. This was my mistake. I just posted this, because I thougt it could be interesting for some people here, using the priority settings in a similar way.
Again: nothing to complain about and no MC-bug or something like this! Was only my mistake to think pushing the MC process would prevent skipping. Leaving everything as it is prevents skipping nearly perfect!

Media Center already sets the core playback thread to time critical, which is the highest thread priority.  If you boost the other threads in the program they'll start to compete with the playback thread.

I was guessing somthing like this. Thanks for clearing this up

[JimH]

This was my mistake. I just posted this, because I thougt it could be interesting for some people here, using the priority settings in a similar way.

It was very interesting.  Thanks for posting it.  We learned something.