Audio Cutoff?

[Shinya]

Computer Specs:
-Seedbox: P4 3.1GHz, 1gb ram, gigabit network card, Server v. 1.10.51
-Personal: C2D 3.8GHz, 3gb ram, gigabit network cards, Server v. 1.10.51
Network: Cat. 6 (gigabit) cables, gigabit cisco router.

Issue: When playing back video on my seedbox (and running no other programs, to test this problem) I get occasional drops in audio transmission - in relatively silent scenes where there is only the sound of two people talking and very little background noise the audio cuts out between sentences (when there is only the barely audible buzzing of background static), which is no problem in itself, but when it goes to resume the audio (someone starts talking again) it can't register quickly enough causing the first (half)second of speech to get cut off all the time.

I assumed it might be a bandwidth or resource conserving measure, but ctrlaltdel-panel resource and network manager shows under 20% CPU usage, 60% ram usage (1.5gb pagefile not included) and 1 - 1.5% network usage. Also worth noting is that I get no such audio cutoff that I could notice when playing back the same video on my Personal rig. I though I should ask anyway if there's a parameter anywhere that sets the media server to cut audio transmission below x db or anything like that to preserve resources/bandwidth on weaker computers.

EDIT: Missed the debug, uploading it now - was a few weeks long, so cut it down to within an hour of playback. Seedbox is ip 192.168.1.3 and personal is ip 192.168.1.2.

[shagrath]

for testing purposes, can you reduce the AC3 bitrate to 256 please ?
you can also try to enable the "remux ac3" option on mencoder config panel

[Shinya]

Changing the bitrate to 256 seems to have fixed it, and I noticed the transcode buffer seemed almost full during playback (pic attached), was the buffer overflow causing it?

And obviously, huge thanks for the quick reply, great software and obviously a great team behind it