Do remote drives need to be 64k blocks?

[m1k3g]

I have got my SMB shares mapped and can run many of the video files without too much problem, but ripped DVD's mostly seem to get an error and then just black screen. Does the remote drive need to be re-partitioned to 64k blocks in order to resolve this? I also experience some stuttering on MPG files but have found that if I pause the video for a few seconds it seems to catch up (sounds like a buffering issue)? Is there anywhere in Sage where buffer sizes may need to be changed?

My network connection is hard coded to 100 full and I typically don't experience any playback problems with the same files in XBMC. The DVD player is set to use the Nvidia decoder, if that makes any difference in network playback?

[GKusnick]

I don't know if this has anything to do with your ripped DVD issue, but as a general rule of thumb, all drives that store video files should be formatted in 64K clusters. The reason for this has to do with seek time v. playback time. For drives with small clusters, the playback time per cluster is much less than the seek time. So if the file is fragmented, or you're playing back more than one file simultaneously, the drive won't be able to buffer data fast enough and you'll get stuttering. With large clusters, the playback time per cluster is greater than the seek time, so even with fragmented files, or multiple playback streams, you'll generally have enough data buffered to minimize stuttering. Whether the drive is local or remote is pretty much irrelevant to this equation; it's all about how much data you can read (or write) between seeks.