Vlc playing movies from external drive hangs/errors out

[XiandreX]

Recently my Vlc has been giving issues playing movies from my external Hdd.
When I run the drive through my WD live tv it plays fine and scans show no errors on the drive.
First it would error out. Now the Audio continues in a loop and the video
hangs, and after about 4 loops it catches up.
I would love to figure out a way to fix this.
I have tried various settings in the video tab of Vlc to no avail.

 

[sm625]

It isnt very efficient to stream off an external drive. Why not copy the file onto a ramdisk, and play it from there? Then your external hdd can sleep while you watch.

 

[XiandreX]

It isnt very efficient to stream off an external drive. Why not copy the file onto a ramdisk, and play it from there? Then your external hdd can sleep while you watch.

It's just frustrating that it plays without issues through the WD live tv but has issues even through USB 3 on my computer.

 

[jkauff]

It's just frustrating that it plays without issues through the WD live tv but has issues even through USB 3 on my computer.

Have you tried any other video players? MPC-HC is open-source and free, and there's a free version of Zoom Player as well. I play movies every day from my USB 3.0 external drives with no issues.

My only guess is that your external drive has a very short sleep timer, and VLC is pre-loading so much of the video that it gives the drive a chance to power down before VLC asks for the next piece of the file.

 

[XiandreX]

Have you tried any other video players? MPC-HC is open-source and free, and there's a free version of Zoom Player as well. I play movies every day from my USB 3.0 external drives with no issues.

My only guess is that your external drive has a very short sleep timer, and VLC is pre-loading so much of the video that it gives the drive a chance to power down before VLC asks for the next piece of the file.

Can I alter the sleep timer or is it hard coded?
I will look into other players.

 

[a3wuerz]

Can I alter the sleep timer or is it hard coded?
I will look into other players.

should be possible to change your windows power management setting, not to turn of external devices or hard disks as long as you are connected to external power supply...

does anyone know how to let vlc prechache the whole movie? would be also very interesting for WLAN network streams...

 

[BarkingGhostar]

It isnt very efficient to stream off an external drive. Why not copy the file onto a ramdisk, and play it from there? Then your external hdd can sleep while you watch.

I've been doing this for years with zero problems. How is it not efficient? I have no issues in W7 and never suffer anything like that the OP describes.

Maybe it is more dependent on using dated technology?

 

[XiandreX]

I've been doing this for years with zero problems. How is it not efficient? I have no issues in W7 and never suffer anything like that the OP describes.

Maybe it is more dependent on using dated technology?

The funny thing is like I said, it works fine through the WD live tv but for whatever reason it has issues on the Windows 8.1
Just very strange and I cannot seem to find a fix or cause from looking on google.

 

[Lorne]

I stream off crappy pen drive and external USB2 drives and no issues even playing video games the same time, Win7 and Power DVD.

 

[XiandreX]

So I decided to try a different player, ended up using Media classic. No errors.
This is frustrating I much prefer the interface of VLC.
I wonder if there is a setting in Vlc that might fix this.