hawkinsa21
New member
Hi all, I posted this on a Windows 7 forum but I've always had a great response from here 
. I have literally copy / pasted from that other thread, but maybe someone here can think of something I haven't??
Background: I used to have an O2 supplied router. It was horrible. I couldn't achieve file transfer speeds above 200kbp/s on the home network, and my Xbox simply did not see the PC. So, I shelled out for a Netgear DGN2000, and that solved all my problems. Transfer speeds were as expected, and I could connect to media on the PC through the dash board without problem - even able to play 1080p high definition media. Result.
But, after playing around with WMC7 which I love the look and feel of, I'm having slowness and connection failures left right and center with it.
- Browsing media folders is painfully slow, and gets worse as the folders contents increases in number
- Navigation effectively hangs and I cannot browse any further, nor 'back up' to the previous folder
- The system hangs for about a minute, before giving the message that there was a connection failure, and did I want to re-connect
- I can 'sometimes' access the folders if I put files I want to watch into their own small folders at the top of the folder structure, so it suggests that the deeper you drill into your media folders the worse the problem gets. Occasionally if I leave the room whilst inside a folder it will allow me to navigate it after 5 minutes or so, so it suggests its just really slow
I have the PC connecting wirelessly to the router, and the Xbox is wired into the router. I have tested with the PC wired into the router and it is the same, so the problem isn't wireless.
I have performed the 'network tuning' on the extender menu, and it has a full band of green bars showing great bandwidth available, so bandwidth isn't a problem.
I have heard that the Xbox takes a long time to enumerate the media?? If so is there a patch? I've already used the optimization option...
I have also used Salami's movie organizer to meta tag a whole folder of media, but this made no difference.
I have turned off the option to update the album covers etc from the Internet.
It isn't firewall related as I'm only using Windows firewall and have turned it off, and the fact that I can browse folders via the dashboard outside of WMC proves it isn't firewall related anyway.
It does sometimes work but I've checked the network performance during this time and it is no different from when it won't work. E.g if I get an error whilst browsing stating that there was a connection failure, I can use the dashboard to immediately play HDTV, so it isn't bandwidth problems.
I've checked the CPU on my PC, it is a Q6600 quad core, and although the CPU does spike, it isn't enough to make the system hang.
I built the PC myself, there are no finger print authentication services or devices on here, which I am aware do cause problems with WMC7, especially on HP machines
EDIT********************
I have also added ports 53, 80, 88 and 3074 to my routers firewall / services list. No difference.
I have downloaded and installed Process Lasso, which you can use to set the process priority on startup, and have setup all the Mcx1 user processes to high. Mcx1 is the user account that the extender uses. This hasn't made one bit of difference though.
What I can definitely confirm is that I can browse the media center settings fairly well (I get maybe 1 in 3 drop outs before I've started browsing). It is once I start accessing media, either music or video's that everything starts crawling at a snails pace. When accessing music, I was finding that it took about 30 seconds to respond, and after moving across two album folders the system hung then about 1 minute later dropped out citing 'connection failure'.
Its the darn media. I'm not sure what else to do but I will update here and will definitely post if I fix the problem or not. I will now try adding the port forwarding rules to outbound traffic. Although it states to add them to the inbound traffic there was a disclaimer stating that you may need to add to both.
I have also tried adding the Mcx1 user account to the admin group with no luck.
I have also added the ports to the outbound firewall traffic as well with no luck.
/EDIT*******************
The reason I want to use WMC over the normal dashboard is that I can take advantage of Divx7's new .mkv file support in WMP12, which works in WMC, when I can eventually get it working... and it is sweet. Fact is it should just work, and I'm determined to get to the bottom of this.
Thanks for reading this far if you have gotten here! I appreciate anyone's input, no matter how small
Alex
. I have literally copy / pasted from that other thread, but maybe someone here can think of something I haven't??Background: I used to have an O2 supplied router. It was horrible. I couldn't achieve file transfer speeds above 200kbp/s on the home network, and my Xbox simply did not see the PC. So, I shelled out for a Netgear DGN2000, and that solved all my problems. Transfer speeds were as expected, and I could connect to media on the PC through the dash board without problem - even able to play 1080p high definition media. Result.
But, after playing around with WMC7 which I love the look and feel of, I'm having slowness and connection failures left right and center with it.
- Browsing media folders is painfully slow, and gets worse as the folders contents increases in number
- Navigation effectively hangs and I cannot browse any further, nor 'back up' to the previous folder
- The system hangs for about a minute, before giving the message that there was a connection failure, and did I want to re-connect
- I can 'sometimes' access the folders if I put files I want to watch into their own small folders at the top of the folder structure, so it suggests that the deeper you drill into your media folders the worse the problem gets. Occasionally if I leave the room whilst inside a folder it will allow me to navigate it after 5 minutes or so, so it suggests its just really slow
I have the PC connecting wirelessly to the router, and the Xbox is wired into the router. I have tested with the PC wired into the router and it is the same, so the problem isn't wireless.
I have performed the 'network tuning' on the extender menu, and it has a full band of green bars showing great bandwidth available, so bandwidth isn't a problem.
I have heard that the Xbox takes a long time to enumerate the media?? If so is there a patch? I've already used the optimization option...
I have also used Salami's movie organizer to meta tag a whole folder of media, but this made no difference.
I have turned off the option to update the album covers etc from the Internet.
It isn't firewall related as I'm only using Windows firewall and have turned it off, and the fact that I can browse folders via the dashboard outside of WMC proves it isn't firewall related anyway.
It does sometimes work but I've checked the network performance during this time and it is no different from when it won't work. E.g if I get an error whilst browsing stating that there was a connection failure, I can use the dashboard to immediately play HDTV, so it isn't bandwidth problems.
I've checked the CPU on my PC, it is a Q6600 quad core, and although the CPU does spike, it isn't enough to make the system hang.
I built the PC myself, there are no finger print authentication services or devices on here, which I am aware do cause problems with WMC7, especially on HP machines
EDIT********************
I have also added ports 53, 80, 88 and 3074 to my routers firewall / services list. No difference.
I have downloaded and installed Process Lasso, which you can use to set the process priority on startup, and have setup all the Mcx1 user processes to high. Mcx1 is the user account that the extender uses. This hasn't made one bit of difference though.
What I can definitely confirm is that I can browse the media center settings fairly well (I get maybe 1 in 3 drop outs before I've started browsing). It is once I start accessing media, either music or video's that everything starts crawling at a snails pace. When accessing music, I was finding that it took about 30 seconds to respond, and after moving across two album folders the system hung then about 1 minute later dropped out citing 'connection failure'.
Its the darn media. I'm not sure what else to do but I will update here and will definitely post if I fix the problem or not. I will now try adding the port forwarding rules to outbound traffic. Although it states to add them to the inbound traffic there was a disclaimer stating that you may need to add to both.
I have also tried adding the Mcx1 user account to the admin group with no luck.
I have also added the ports to the outbound firewall traffic as well with no luck.
/EDIT*******************
The reason I want to use WMC over the normal dashboard is that I can take advantage of Divx7's new .mkv file support in WMP12, which works in WMC, when I can eventually get it working... and it is sweet. Fact is it should just work, and I'm determined to get to the bottom of this.
Thanks for reading this far if you have gotten here! I appreciate anyone's input, no matter how small
Alex
