how to avoid hickups in playback?

[Cosworth]

Through a lot of tweaking and reading here I've gotten to a point where I'm happy with playback in just about any format except one little nuisance. I have yet to watch an entire movie without one or 2 hickups where the picture freezes, sound continues and the picture then plays catch-up a second later.

I've tried to avoid all kind of scheduled tasks etc. that might mess things up, but I can't seem to identify the culprit here.

Do you guys have any good tips for identifying the cause of such intermittent slowdowns of the PC - or just how to get rid of them?

[stefan]

A long shot, but have you tried defragmenting the drive regularly?

[Cosworth]

Good suggestion but yes I have (regularly) AND I have perfect playback from an xbox reading the exact same file, so it seems to be related to windows activities that "hijack" the CPU/HD etc.

[lseats]

have you turned off indexing for all your drives or turned off the indexing service?

[SLGF2A]

Cosworth, I have been experiencing this as well for the last few weeks, after many months of trouble-free operation. Becasue this just started happening lately and because I only use my machine for GBPVR, I'm reluctant to think it is a computer/HD resource issue.

It only seems to happen on about 1 out of 4 recordings lately but with seemingly no pattern. I just reinstalled my hauppauge drivers to see if that helps at all. I'm open to other suggestions if anybody has them.

[Cosworth]

have you turned off indexing for all your drives or turned off the indexing service?

Good suggestion!
I'll try it and look for improvements. Given that this problem is semi-random, it might take a while.

I'll post any findings later.

[gomjabar]

im having hickups lately on both livetv and recordings. Only started a week or so ago?

[Pioneer4x4]

If you replay the file, does it hickup at the same place? If not, it would lead to a playback problem, if so, a recording problem. If you make can, make a DVD of the file, and play that back as a test.

[Cosworth]

Pioneer4x4: No it plays fine with my Xbox, so the recording should be OK