Audio dropping when streaming video on LAN in WMP?

[rpeters83]

I'm not sure if I noticed this before but when I load a DVD rip (AVI) from my networked drive (gigabit lan, esata on the source) into WMP 11, after a while, the audio will skip quickly for about half a second - very short, but annoying when watching movies.

When looking at the external disk the media is coming from, I noticed that every time the audio would skip, the drive light would flash. Meaning, when WMP grabs more for the buffer, it must be enough to cause the audio to skip.

I tried increasing the buffer time but it still does it. It does it on two machines of mine that are decently powerful (a core 2 quad and an athlon 64 2.5ghz). Any ideas? I can't use VLC as it is for my HTPC and it has an issue with larger fonts. I'd like to use WMP as it contains my library. Media Player Classic seems to work just fine, but wanted to see if WMP could be saved first.

What can I do to fix this? Thanks.