The VideoLAN Forums

Hey,

When I play a video from one of my hard drives, after a few minutes the video will often freeze (with the audio looping the last few seconds). Occasionally after a 30 seconds the video will resume sometimes it doesn't. VLC appears to work fine on my other hard drives. There doesn't appear to be anything wrong with the hard drive, I scanned it with HDTune and all sectors turned out fine.

Has anyone encountered such a problem before? I'm running Windows 7 using VLC 2.1.5

Thanks for any help offered.

bad file ? did you try the same file on another hard drive ? does it work or is it the same ?

Thanks for the reply.

I've tried different files they all run fine on a different hard drive but freeze on this one. It only appears to be HD videos that are having freezing issues.

....by reading you first post again and watching your response i am getting a headache
i asked you for that specific hard drive because you had problem on it, and you first post said "a video" wich mean normaly a unique file, otherwise please use next time "videos" with a S.

my first diagnostic was for you to move the video on another hard drive to see if the file was faulty or if the issue was from the hard drive, of course if you had issue on only that hard drive all files on others hard drive will work fine.

i think the issue is either your hard drive is too old, of course it will still work but the read speed is not enough for your HD file, or you hard drive is dying, it start playing but read speed get slower which could be the reason your file stop getting read.

what kind of video are you trying to read ?
-huge mkv ? more than 30 giga per files ?
-mt2s that require a high reading speed ?
or some uncompress file ?

anyway i would empty the hard drive fast before anything else just in case, depending on the size of your hard drive it should take less than 10 hours.

what is the model of the hard drive you are having issue with ? size , date of buy , and how much do you use it (24/7 ?)
most hard drive nowadays will live more than 10 year depending on how much you write on them.

somes hard drive i bought in 2004 died in less than 5 year because i use them non stop by writting, deleting, moving files, when i saw they where getting weak i moved all data, and they died at the end of the tranfere (3/5)

if you play a lot with data buy hard drive that are made for that, i recommend personnaly some RED of WD.

Also, regardless of whatever hard drive error checking software you've used, I recommend opening a administrator command prompt, and running the command chkdsk X: /r

(Replace X with the correct drive letter) this will tell windows to perform a thorough, surface scan of the entire hard drive, and could potentially take several hours to complete. I've known chkdsk to find hard drive errors when other hard drive diagnostics software shows everything is fine. Even one bad block on the hard drive can cause this to happen. Things like cross-linked files, or an error in the MFT can do this too... All of these things can be corrected using chkdsk.

Hope this helps.