I have a fairly powerful machine as an HTPC (win7, 4 gigs ram, celeron proc), gig network and can't play just some MKVs over the network with VLC (stuttering/starting stopping video - audio continues just fine). My gaming machine (win8, 16 gigs ram, i52500K) can play these files just fine.

Physical connections to the machine are fine (tried a different drop and changed the patch to the wall as well and can play other MKVs just fine, I thought it was a file size issue but it doesn't seem like it). I haven't done a packet capture on it yet to see if it's dropping packets but everything else seems great.

I tried a pcie intel gig nic to see if the onboard might be the culprit for some reason (hw, drivers for realtek) but the same problem exists.

My next step is to connect a macbook air to the port and try it on there - isolating the htpc itself. Both my desktop and htpc are connected via the same switch to the server with the MKV files - i.e. doesn't seem to be a network/server issue at this time. I thought I'd also try an Ubuntu Live CD on the HTPC as well to see if it might be sw or hw.

Does anyone have any other troubleshooting thoughts on this issue? Is there a way to get VLC to buffer a few seconds on the machine playing the file over the network (SMB) as I don't really want to stream these if at all possible or retranscode them in any way. Why might this be happening on the htpc? Not powerful enough? Software problems?

I was wondering if some blu-rays when made into MKV or originally encoded onto the disc (regardles of file size) are done at a much higher bitrate. I did try some very large blu-rays (MKV) last night and it seemed they are ok, it's just some don't play well at all on this machine only.

I'm kind of new to storing blu-rays on the network for convenience and all has gone well until recently with certain files on one specific machine.

Any help is appreciated.