How to optimize audio and video for Server 2003?

I have the octitron running. It has been running for nearly 3 weeks 24/7 at 100% load.
The temperature and stability is there
there is only one major problem
audio and video lag severly.
I enabled hardware acceleration for video playback, but no matter what even when I am playing say a movie which is on the harddrive, the video will skip like ever 10 seconds for like a second or so.
The audio is also terrible, I have the latest drivers, and the sound is awful, its all staticy and their is a loud interference type noise over it.

I also cant get windows media player to install. I have tried version 9, 10 and 11 to no avail.
I have been using VLC and that too is running static and choppy.

Any ideas are welcome, there must be some settings in the operating system which need to be changed.

K-TRON

 

did you run dpc latency checker?

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

does it spike when you have the audio skip? if so then its likely a driver problem.

 

I have an old Pentium 4 Desktop which I use as a server, running Windows server 2003 R2 (SP2). Don’t care much for audio and video performance since I don’t use it for multimedia; but one time when I was installing and configuring it, I remember watching a DVD movie, but don't recall noticing any lockups or anything out of the ordinary. But that was the only time I used it for watching a video. Now it is stored away with only a network cable (no monitor, no keyboard, so I can’t test it again) , everything is done over the network.

 

I had the same problem on an Asus P5KE board. I had to roll back to version 178.14 nvidia drivers to fix the audio stuttering in VLC. try it.

 

Well I am currently running ATi graphics. I will try the dpc latency check program.

I finally figured out how to install windows media 9. version 10 and 11 are not working. The lag is still present, so its not just VLC.

The other thing is the contrast looks way too high, like not normal. I have the latest dotnetframework, and the latest catalyst. I wonder why this is happening. Maybe its cause the version of server 2003 I have is a trial version.

K-TRON

 

well, maybe it´s because server 2003 is not optimized for audio and video playback? clearly this os is built for other tasks.

have you tried xp64 ? it was released in 2005 and i use it on my laptop without any problems. audio and video performance are great...


concerning dcp latency checker, that one might show high spikes, but unless those spikes don´t sky-rocket to some 2000 or 3000 or higher you should be able to watch video without any problems.
had a faulty wifi driver a while back caused such high spikes, and i only found out using dcp latency checker by accident. i did not realize there were such problems in daily use.

so unless the spikes for dcp latency checker are not too high, my guess is the os optimization.

 

I don't know why you don't use an OS that's better at resource management and multimedia than Server03...

Your problem really sounds like a driver latency issue.