Search

I’ve been having an issue for a long time now where video hosted on WHS is played back in Media Center and seemingly randomly the video stutters or stops completely and the UI becomes unresponsive for a while.  After a lot of digging and troubleshooting both in Media Center and Windows Home Server I discovered a simple trick which laid the issue bare.

When the issue occurs you can look at task manager on WHS then it may appear that there is little CPU utilisation, the trick here is to add the columns “IO Read”, “IO Write” and “IO Other”.  You will likely see that DEMigrator.exe has numbers increasing in “IO Other” when the stuttering is happening.  I implemented a fix from the We Got Served Forums and it seems to have worked a treat!  I followed the workaround on the page, repeated here for my records and as it will be easier for me to find and pass on. 🙂

The fix is very simple to implement, just create two text files with the contents below and rename them as indicated.  Create two scheduled tasks, one for on and one for off, and set them to run over night.  I have mine set so DEMigrator is running for three hours between 3am-6am.  You will get an error about the service not running but other than that all should be well.

DemigratorOff.bat

@echo off
sc stop "DriveExtenderMigrator"
sc config "DriveExtenderMigrator" start= disabled
exit

DemigratorOn.bat
@echo off
sc config "DriveExtenderMigrator" start= demand
sc start "DriveExtenderMigrator"
exit

Enjoy!

Keegan