TheGreenButton - Windows Media Center Forums

Had a perfectly functioning Windows 10 1703 setup with MC on a single 1TB hard drive. System has a Pentium G4620 CPU and Asus B150M-C D3 motherboard and 4GB of RAM.
OS and programs only occupied about 33GB, so I decided to clone everything to a 60GB SSD I had laying around. I used MiniTool Partition Wizard to do the clone which appeared to go well. In MC settings, I changed the recording drive to D: which is the old 1TB HD after a full wipe and reformat to NTFS. Now it takes exactly 41-seconds sitting at the blank blue smokey MC screen before Live TV starts or a previously recorded TV show starts playing. They used to start up instantly. Everything else seems to work properly aside from the 41-second delay.

Any ideas?

You could disable the page file on SSD and enable on your recording drive. Other than that it is difficult to say what is going on, you could image and try a repair install? I would consider your HDD is going bad or your network but you mentioned no changes to that so it sounds like win 10 being win 10.

I tried moving recording and buffer to SSD in order to rule out the HDD. No change. I noticed if I right-clicked on .wtv files on the HDD, they would play in Media Player immediately. It's only MC that had the delay. Also, .mkv, .mp4, etc files all played immediately off the HDD. That made me think, maybe it's a DRM issue, because I know switching hard drives changes some unique identifiers that makes it necessary to reactivate Windows and such, so I thought maybe DRM isn't seeing this as the same machine. So I decided to uninstall "PlayReady PC runtime amd64". Voila! That worked! Now live TV and recorded TV play instantly in MC.

When is PlayReady PC runtime amd64 needed, and what would be the repercussions of not having it installed? So far Live TV buffer works, playback of old recordings work, recording new TV works. Haven't really found any reason to re-install it.

play ready should only be necessary in WMC if your using a cable card which isn't possible with v1703 anyhow. win 10 uses play ready 3 and enables HDCP 2.2 for 4K DRM for Netflix and blue ray ultra DRM. It's possible that the legacy play ready 2 was causing problems with the WTV files.

Thank you.

I had this problem (long delay when playing anything) the other day after restoring my system from backup to a different HDD.

Removing Play Ready fixed it.