I've noticed several problems playing back WMVs on a XB360:

1.  Some WMVs freeze for a couple seconds at certain points.  The problem is recreatable on two different 360s.  Enabling flow control on the MCE box has no effect.

2. Audio takes a long time to sync when skipping forward or backward in a WMV.  This is compared to when extending from MCE2005.

3. Sometimes when skipping forward/backward, the screen will go black (with no audio).  Hitting backward/forward again usually brings the picture back.  Sometimes it takes a couple skips to get the picture to return.

4. It appears that overscan of video playback has changed quite a bit from MCE2005.  I have 16:9 videos that no longer fill my entire (16:9) screen - they now have a small black border around the entire image.

Anyone else experience any of these?

I have been experiencing 1, 2, and 3.  I have a p4 3ghz cpu w/ 1gig of ram, and most of my wmv's are stored on a usb hard drive.  If someone could tell me what I need to upgrade, or if vista is simply broken I'd greatly appreciate it.  Hearing my 2 year old screech when ice age freezes is anything but fun.

WMV Sucks $%^&

i hate this

Same issues here. I resorted to playing the files through the XBox 360 Media tab (shared via Media Player on the PC).

I haven't tried playing my WMV's from within MCE but have always in the past just use the Media tab in the 360 Dashboard. This method seems to work reliably for me... when I get home I will see if I have any issues playing WMV's through MCE... Cheers,

I used the media tab on my 360 to play the same wmv's and had no issues.  The interface is terrible though, goto media tab, select videos, select computer, then get an alphabetized list of file names. Is this a dos based application?

1. My microwave oven causes playback problems, possibly cordless phones as well; something to consider

2. ???

3. ???

4. Pull up the info screen while viewing a video and use the zoom feature to expand the videos to full screen.

1. My 360s are hardwired, not wireless, so I doubt I have an interference problem.  Also, I should note, that this exact hardware combo has been running fine with MCE2005 for well over a year.  In fact, I can dual boot back into MCE2005 (and reassociate the 360) and play the 'trouble' videos without problem.

4. It isn't that sort of zoom problem.

Thanks though.

I have the exact same problems here.  Running Vista Ultimate on:

P4 3 ghz

2G ram

256M video card

So it can't be performance related.   I'm going to try other video formats to see if it still happens.  I know it only happens through the xbox as it is fine directly on the computer.

I'm having the same problem

Vista Home Premium

Athlon XP 3500+

2GB RAM

nVidia GeForce 6800 GT

At first I thought it was the My Movies plugin, but I get the same exact issues going through the Video interface of Media Center. The videos play fine on my PC, and they play fine going through the Media Blade of the Xbox 360. I can't get a single WMV to play through without freezing\skipping every few seconds. Kind of makes MCE somewhat useless.

Using Transcode360 on Divx files eems to work fine though, too bad Transcode360 doesn't transcode WMV to MPEG2 as well.

Same here.  I've put the same WMV's on an external USB and watched them without issue directly from the XBox, with no connection thru MCE.  Any Microsoft guys have any opinions, tips, or guidance?

DarrenM:

It appears that overscan of video playback has changed quite a bit from MCE2005.  I have 16:9 videos that no longer fill my entire (16:9) screen - they now have a small black border around the entire image.

I noticed I do have this problem on my lcd projector.  I have an overscan option which is set to off, I didn't play w/ it, but I suspect if I set overscan to on the it would've solved the problem.  I have an 84" screen and it was about a 1/2" border all the way around.

I was also able to watch a WMV without issue last night.  It was encoded at a lower quality then most of my wmv's. I'm not sure that's relevant, but it's the only distinction I'm aware of.

All of my WMVs have issues. These WMV's play fine through UPnP on the XBOX360 but I can't get them to play through MCE in Vista.

I really need a fix or workaround for this problem.

My WMVs are Encoded with Windows Media Video 9 at 90% Quality VBR and Windows Media 9 Pro 96 kHz, 5.1 CHannel, 24 bit VBR

My hunch is that this has something to do with how I'm encoding audio. I'm going to play around with different audio settings on the encoder and if I have any success I'll post it here

Cross-post:  http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/170495.aspx.  The discussion is about 2-3 second pauses in video playback using Xbox360 and Vista (in my case x64 Ultimate)

I have the same symptoms.  I have more data:

The movie only shows the 2-3 second pauses during certain portions of the movie and it always shows the pauses in the same place.  The video, in this case The Incredibles, has a section about 9:30 seconds into the movie, where a deliberately grainy black and white motif is used to represent archive footage in the movie so we realize it is a flashback.  The artificial static over the whole screen appears to be more demanding for video bandwidth in the .wmv format.  Apparently it doesn't compress as well, and thus requires 6x the bandwidth.  After that section of the movie is complete, pauses stop.

Disk activity during this portion of the video increased disk i/o (.5MBps vs. 3 MBps) .  Network activity shows a correlation.  It jumps from a stochastic average of about 1.5Mbps to a very flat 7Mbps, where the primary offender is the ehshell.exe process.  6 x 1.5Mbps = 9 Mbps.  Therefore the stream is being throttled by something to 7Mbps.

But by what?  I went to the network controller and turned off QoS.  It turns out Vista has a new way to throttle outgoing network traffic (pacer.sys).  I believe pacer.sys is disabled by disabling QoS in the network controller.  I did that and it had an effect, but not the desired effect.  The network i/o now peaked well above 7Mbps.  The effect was that the video would pause and stay paused until well after that section.  It would then skip over the higher bandwidth portion of the video and return to normal.

For the record I tried the following test cases.  In all cases the .wmv file is on the same hardware.  Only #6 failed in all three sub-cases.

1. Vista Ultimate x64 using Media Player.
2. Vista Ultimate x64 using Media Center.
3. Using file sharing on notebook using Vista Home Premium
4. Using automatically loaded sharing under Media Player on said notebook.
5. Using Xbox360 as extender to MCE 2005 x86 on same hardware as x64 machine
6. Using Xbox360 as extender to x64 machine
   1. With Netgear GS108 Gigabit LAN switch only
   2. With D-Link DGL4300 Switch/Router only
   3. With Both switches in line (normal config)

Added Test Cases (2/25/2007).  The same movie was played under some new circumstances:

1. Same WMV file played using Media Video Blade works fine
2. Same movie endoced as MPEG works fine (with ~11Mbps network throughput)

Here is my conclusion:

• Based on 1-6, the bottleneck is probably in the Xbox360 in handling WMV files.
• Based on 5/6, the bottleneck has to do with the Vista Media Extender client on the Xbox360.

By the way, I also tried the recommendations in Microsoft Knowledgebase article 929707.  They did not help.

This makes sense, the problems I have in my videos always occure in a particularly video intensive spot. However, I have yet to see any movie of mine only pause in a single spot. THe pauses happen frequently to the point where the videos are basically unwatchable.

I'll try turning off QoS and see if that helps or if I get the same results as you did. Considering that I have had success playing these same videos through the Video Blade of the 360 dashboard, shared through WMP 11, I am inclined to believe you that the problem is most likely the Media Center client on the Xbox.

Let me know if you have any other success

 

-Heath