Micro stutters / single frame drops

[podonnell]

Have you actually seen the frame-drop counter increase in the playback info, or are you going by eye?

I actually just just saw they had that counter when troubleshooting another issue. I went back to make sure I wasn't seeing things, and I do in fact get +1 dropped frames every six seconds or so. So about ten per minute.

Could you try playing the same video locally on a PC using something like VLC? VLC can also display if there are frame drops and how much of those have happened.
This could help rule out the video from being the issue. If the same thing happens with VLC, good chance it's the video.

Great idea. Just tried this (using MPC-BE) over my local network. I just opened the movie file locally -- on the same PC I was playing it through to test moments ago. No dropped frames.

Though looking at your log, I see it's a BD remux that you're trying to play. How are your clients connected to the server? Are they all local or remote? Do they all have a wired connection to the server? I'm willing to bet it may be due to the large amount of data being handled at once. Maybe the frame drops happen when the network connection temporarily slows down enough to cause the issue. Can you also try re-encoding the video to a lower bitrate? You can use a program like Handbrake to re-encode the video to lower its bitrate.

In my tests, both client and server are within the same gigabit network. They both have 1.0 Gbps cards.
This gave me an idea, and instead of re-encoding it, I tried playing with the quality settings -- Anything that is directstream (60 Mbps and up) has the issue. When I go below that, it causes it to transcode due to the video file being a higher bitrate than I'm allowing being streamed. Does this help narrow anything down?