I first came across this problem when trying to connect my Windows 7 32bit laptop to my Vista x64 PC running MediaPortal 1.0.2.0.
The symptoms of the problem where very strange – my MediaPortal client on the laptop refused to connect, even using the Vista machines (fixed) IP, with the windows and anti-virus firewall disabled, and PING command returning positive results. Mapping file shares from my Vista machine on my laptop worked fine, and I could browse content, if a bit slowly, however when playing back Recorded TV files (encoded in raw TS format) on my laptop using VLC Player resulted in skipping and terrible quality, and very high CPU usage on my Vista machine. This then caused TV playing on my Vista MediaPortal to jump and skip as the machine became overwhelmed trying to serve my laptop!!!
The problems even occurred when accessing my SharePoint Services web server running in VMware on the Vista machine, either through RDP or via its web address (which funnily enough serves this blog!!!) which in theory shouldn't even touch my Vista machine at all...
As you can imagine not what the doctor ordered from a home media centre!!!
Initially when googling the problem, most people pointed to this being an issue with Vista and some of its features, but most of these seemed to be pre service pack 1 issues. As my Vista machine was Service Pack 1 and updated to the most recent updates as of 10/02/2010, I assumed most of these fixes where not relevant.
In the spirit of thoroughness (and desperation to fix the problem) I thought I'd try them out and see what worked. So very briefly here's what I tried and what worked:
Turn UAC off – no effect.
Disable Aero Desktop – still the problem occurred.
Disable Indexing Options – slight improvement but don't get excited yet.
Update NIC drivers – nope.
Disable IPv6 – again slight improvement
Disable Windows Remote Differential Compression – Did help initially, but after a few seconds (no more than a minute) of streaming/copying files across the network, the problem was back.
So back to the drawing board I went...
And then I had one of those rare occasions when you actually catch a process, or service causing the problem!!! When I had checked before it was the System process which was consuming all the processor time, and therefore not much I could do about it, but on this occurrence it was the AVG Network Scanner Service which was hogging the CPU resources.
In desperation I ended the process...
BANG!!! CPU resources dropped through the floor to 1-2% per core (dual core processor), then the service restarted automatically and the problem started again!!!
GOTCHA!!!! Went on Google and searched for the process causing this very problem and it seems to be a (reasonably) common problem since AVG 8.5-9.0. So I removed AVG, and installed Avast Anti-Virus and the problem went away!!!
I can now copy files (really) quickly between laptop and Vista PC, and vice versa, connect to the MediaPortal TV Server on my Vista machine from my laptop, and stream media files without it even registering on my Vista PC!!!
So I fixed my problem, however I would urge all readers to exercise caution when reading this if you are assuming this is the be all and end all for fixing this problem, because it isn't. I had a very particular problem which occurred in a certain set of circumstances. This isn't to say nothing can be learned from this, quite the contrary in fact.
I would advise anyone having similar issues to:
- Patch Vista to its latest service pack and additional updates (you do this anyway... right...?).
- Make sure you have the most up to date drivers for your hardware (motherboard, network card, sound card, graphics, storage controller, etc...).
- Monitor your running processes and resource utilisation when the problem occurs (both CPU and Memory) to try and pin down the offending process.
- Finally if you are going to try these or any other fixes out there on the web, you investigate then thoroughly first and you are comfortable making the changes otherwise you could do more harm than good.
Happy hunting...