constant skipping media player 11

Whenever I play anything in media player from MP3s to DVDs, it's really choppy, even if media player is the only thing running. I may not have a supercomputer, but I'm pretty confident that Vista x64 + playing music can't be more demanding than recent games like Half-Life 2, etc. that run flawlessly on my system. Checking into the task manager to see what's up, the CPU usage (for no apparent reason) looks like an EKG, randomly fluctuating between low and high. I looked into the issue a little further and media player itself appears to be the culprit. Anyone else have this problem or an idea on how to fix it?

Why it is doing it I don't know but on my machine I have found that if I open the Options window under Tools then the CPU settles down and the music plays correctly. Further experimentation found than any open dialog box will achieve the same results. I have bugged it so we shall see what happens from there.
Ted
"Van Olmstead" <Van Olmstead@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message

Whenever I play anything in media player from MP3s to DVDs, it's really choppy, even if media player is the only thing running. I may not have a supercomputer, but I'm pretty confident that Vista x64 + playing music can't be more demanding than recent games like Half-Life 2, etc. that run flawlessly on my system. Checking into the task manager to see what's up, the CPU usage (for no apparent reason) looks like an EKG, randomly fluctuating between low and high. I looked into the issue a little further and media player itself appears to be the culprit. Anyone else have this problem or an idea on how to fix it?

"Van Olmstead" <Van Olmstead@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message

Whenever I play anything in media player from MP3s to DVDs, it's really choppy, even if media player is the only thing running. I may not have a supercomputer, but I'm pretty confident that Vista x64 + playing music can't be more demanding than recent games like Half-Life 2, etc. that run flawlessly on my system. Checking into the task manager to see what's up, the CPU usage (for no apparent reason) looks like an EKG, randomly fluctuating between low and high. I looked into the issue a little further and media player itself appears to be the culprit. Anyone else have this problem or an idea on how to fix it?

If it's a rather fresh install, you are drolly still building search indexes. Initially when I first installed and attempted to play some of my music collection, it was very skippy.
Now that I've been running vista for a few weeks it is playing music (and recorded TV) flawlessly.

That does sound like something Microsoft would have Media Player do.
I don't have a lot of media or even files for that matter so unless it's helping itself to network shares to index other stuff, if what you're saying's true it should go away pretty soon. I'll give it some time and see what happens.
Anyhow, I can't find an option to turn off any Media Player indexing, so Microsoft if you're reading you should probably include one or at least make the thread for indexing lower priority than the play music one....
"Eric G. van der Paardt" wrote:

"Van Olmstead" <Van Olmstead@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message Whenever I play anything in media player from MP3s to DVDs, it's really choppy, even if media player is the only thing running. I may not have a supercomputer, but I'm pretty confident that Vista x64 + playing music can't be more demanding than recent games like Half-Life 2, etc. that run flawlessly on my system. Checking into the task manager to see what's up, the CPU usage (for no apparent reason) looks like an EKG, randomly fluctuating between low and high. I looked into the issue a little further and media player itself appears to be the culprit. Anyone else have this problem or an idea on how to fix it?
If it's a rather fresh install, you are drolly still building search indexes. Initially when I first installed and attempted to play some of my music collection, it was very skippy.
Now that I've been running vista for a few weeks it is playing music (and recorded TV) flawlessly.

I'm finding the same thing when playing video files. The same file that plays fine in WinXP Media player will skip and have odd artifacts when anything moves. Sometimes it's worse than at other times, but it isn't the smooth play I'm used to. I don't know if it is Vista or the Media Player. Has anyone submitted a report on it?
"Van Olmstead" wrote:

Whenever I play anything in media player from MP3s to DVDs, it's really choppy, even if media player is the only thing running. I may not have a supercomputer, but I'm pretty confident that Vista x64 + playing music can't be more demanding than recent games like Half-Life 2, etc. that run flawlessly on my system. Checking into the task manager to see what's up, the CPU usage (for no apparent reason) looks like an EKG, randomly fluctuating between low and high. I looked into the issue a little further and media player itself appears to be the culprit. Anyone else have this problem or an idea on how to fix it?

Its probably not Media Player indexing, but the windows search feature. If it thinks you are "idle" it will index the entire drive. Unfortunately a computer just sitting playing media looks like it is idle. Also it could be disk fragmentation, seen it happen before you might want to check it out.
"Van Olmstead" wrote:

That does sound like something Microsoft would have Media Player do.
I don't have a lot of media or even files for that matter so unless it's helping itself to network shares to index other stuff, if what you're saying's true it should go away pretty soon. I'll give it some time and see what happens.
Anyhow, I can't find an option to turn off any Media Player indexing, so Microsoft if you're reading you should probably include one or at least make the thread for indexing lower priority than the play music one....
"Eric G. van der Paardt" wrote:
"Van Olmstead" <Van Olmstead@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message Whenever I play anything in media player from MP3s to DVDs, it's really choppy, even if media player is the only thing running. I may not have a supercomputer, but I'm pretty confident that Vista x64 + playing music can't be more demanding than recent games like Half-Life 2, etc. that run flawlessly on my system. Checking into the task manager to see what's up, the CPU usage (for no apparent reason) looks like an EKG, randomly fluctuating between low and high. I looked into the issue a little further and media player itself appears to be the culprit. Anyone else have this problem or an idea on how to fix it?
If it's a rather fresh install, you are drolly still building search indexes. Initially when I first installed and attempted to play some of my music collection, it was very skippy.
Now that I've been running vista for a few weeks it is playing music (and recorded TV) flawlessly.

I found that the x86 version of WMP 11 to be very choppy, but when I played the same video w/ the native x64 version it worked just fine.
As an aside, does anybody know if there's a way to get the file associations to work for the x64 version, other than manually editing the registry? If I double-click on a video file it assumes I want the 32-bit version to play.
-- omellet ------------------------------------------------------------------------ omellet's Profile: http://vista64.net/forums/member.php?userid=881 View this thread: http://vista64.net/forums/showthread.php?t=11098

Just so you guys know, there is a similar discussion going on here, http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.mspx?query=stuttering&dg=microsoft.public.windows.vista.music_pictures_video&cat=en_US_5867FF6C-B066-415C-91A1-B4EFED56EF70&lang=en&cr=US&pt=&catlist=D1CBF0BD-E8EE-4D73-8ECC-15AF7EC6783B&dglist=&ptlist=&exp=&sloc=en-us&mid=dbd94a56-ab62-428c-91c3-f5e7162128b9
CalBanyan
"Van Olmstead" wrote:

Whenever I play anything in media player from MP3s to DVDs, it's really choppy, even if media player is the only thing running. I may not have a supercomputer, but I'm pretty confident that Vista x64 + playing music can't be more demanding than recent games like Half-Life 2, etc. that run flawlessly on my system. Checking into the task manager to see what's up, the CPU usage (for no apparent reason) looks like an EKG, randomly fluctuating between low and high. I looked into the issue a little further and media player itself appears to be the culprit. Anyone else have this problem or an idea on how to fix it?

I'm having the exact same problem, but I'm convinced it's a DRM related issue. Have a read of this article;
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/3931679a28.html
I only hope that Microsoft releases a patch to fix the problem!!
"CalBanyan" wrote:

Just so you guys know, there is a similar discussion going on here, http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.mspx?query=stuttering&dg=microsoft.public.windows.vista.music_pictures_video&cat=en_US_5867FF6C-B066-415C-91A1-B4EFED56EF70&lang=en&cr=US&pt=&catlist=D1CBF0BD-E8EE-4D73-8ECC-15AF7EC6783B&dglist=&ptlist=&exp=&sloc=en-us&mid=dbd94a56-ab62-428c-91c3-f5e7162128b9
CalBanyan
"Van Olmstead" wrote:
Whenever I play anything in media player from MP3s to DVDs, it's really choppy, even if media player is the only thing running. I may not have a supercomputer, but I'm pretty confident that Vista x64 + playing music can't be more demanding than recent games like Half-Life 2, etc. that run flawlessly on my system. Checking into the task manager to see what's up, the CPU usage (for no apparent reason) looks like an EKG, randomly fluctuating between low and high. I looked into the issue a little further and media player itself appears to be the culprit. Anyone else have this problem or an idea on how to fix it?