[Rich A]

I would say your computer setup is easily capable of handling any kind of digital playback. It could be some configuration of the components that is giving you trouble. Here's how I would troubleshoot this.

First find the highest HD recorded show you can. When playing back you can see all the details (720 1080 Dolby 5.1 etc) in the area at the bottom of the screen when you hit the correct button on your remote or keyboard. I don't recall what that button is, (I'm using a programmed Harmony Remote myself and haven't changed anything in that area for almost four years now) I think it would be return button on your keyboard.

Anyway you should look for a 1080 recording. Exit BTV and try running that file with some other application. Like Windows Media Player or VLC or some other stand alone player. To really be sure you should not just exit BTV but actually shut it down for this test.

If it plays back smoothly there, then you've narrowed down the problem to some component or setting that BTV is using.

One thing I am concerned about is your Raid 0 array. Is that your only drive in this setup? In other words are you using the Raid array as your boot drive? I also have a Raid 0 setup in my HTPC, BUT it is dedicated to show storage only. I have a separate physical drive that my OS and programs reside on. There have been long and drawn out discussions about the reliability of Raid 0 setups and I hope we don't get mired down in that here. BUT the problem with a Raid 0 being your ONLY drive in a BTV environment is that not only will you have all the Windows house-keeping being done there, (swap file etc) but you would also have all the applications running there, as well as the BTV recordings.

Granted a Raid 0 will indeed make a notable difference in drive access speed, but with today's SATA HDs you really don't need it for your OS drive. I have my Raid 0 set up for show storage and it goes back to the days when drives were maxed out at 120 GB or less. At one time I had four 250 GB to give me a TB for storage because at that time the 250 was the biggest drive available. This is not the case today however. Ideally (if you really need the drive space for storage) would be something like a good SATA 3 80GB or bigger Operating system drive, and a pair of 500 GB SATA drives in RAID 0 for your storage. Of course now drives are starting to show up at 1 TB. Plus I believe some of the Seagate drives now come with 3 to 5 year warranties.

Before you start with the playback check using another player, check to see if you are running BTV in Overlay or the Advanced 3d playback. Overlay should work fine. The 3d playback however is known to give you trouble with digital playback.

Let us know if the playback works better with a non-BTV player and we can go on from there.