How many passes before defrag finishes?

Yea I haven't fiddled with 10 bit decode yet but the higher quality filter/renderers or whatever madVR type of stuff is mostly cpu bound I think.  

Any web-dl release has a bitrate so low that it can't be a fragmentation issue unless you have some ridiculously fragmented drives.  Even at 1080p those are like 3-5GB for the entire movie, meaning the megabytes read per second is super super low.

I have doubts about spash pro ex, an up to date codec pack like klite shark007 cccp or whatever with mad vr is probably a better bet for quality.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6674/getting-the-best-out-of-an-ivy-bridge-htpc-windows-8-madvr-and-more

Well for a cpu like that, not likely.

But same goes for the harddrive, even a raw bluray rip tends to be around just 30GB of video data.

In theatrical 2k it tends to be just around 30MB/s http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/128963-how-digital-technology-is-reinventing-cinema/2  Bluray is more in the teens to 40 ish Mb/s, megabits not bytes which is 8x less, and about 5Megs a second to show you how low a load that is.

http://www.storagereview.com/western\_digital\_caviar\_green\_2tb\_review\_wd20ears

even slow green drives read sequentially many times faster than whats necessary for video.

Anyways as I said dxva should be accelerating the decode via gpu.  If that fails to work right on a strangely encoded video it can jerk, and in such case run something like vlc player assuming you are playing an mkv or such file and decode it with cpu only to see if that solves the problem.

You might be able to trip it up if you random access the drive enough while its reading the movie, but you already said you have an ssd for os/apps so thats not likely.

Course the other possibility is your drive is failing, do a S.M.A.R.T. check on it, run your manufacturers diagnostics on it...  or simply let it defrag since any hard to read sectors will be reallocated if you are lucky, until it runs out of spare sectors of course.  I think stuff only reallocates on writes though.

And no, you don't need to run ccleaner each day, it might even be counter productive to wipe out your cache files like that.  This stuff is just fact, only a certain amount of data needs to be read to play a video file, and drives are much faster than that.  I'm sure a variant of your drive is benchmarked on storagereview if you look for it, and you can go look at its sequential read performance yourself.

My theories are varied because I can't read your mind, or see what you haven't told me, I can only guess based on the little information contained in your posts.

HD Tune Pro does the work fine for checking, and just in any case S.M.A.R.T. is turned always on (I think) in BIOS, if that's what you mean. I haven't had any problems, so I haven't searched for particular information regarding HDD's, except what to do when HDD starts to make weird sounds and such, cause I have experienced HDD failure and death of it, but mine doesn't show any signs of not even close to start failing, yet, I haven't done any checkups, cause I haven't done anything that could push its limits to max, but I will run HD Tune Pro and then research a little bit about SMART and manufacturers diagnostics.

Oh and...yes, mostly I got problems playing .mkv files only. I'm using Splash Pro EX as primary video player, for 10-bit video's I use VLC, and in any other bad case, I use Media Player Classic as last.

Last movie that I had problems and defrag kinda fixed it/maybe not, maybe just coincidence, but

it was Riddick Unrated DC 2013 1080p WEB-DL H264.

Sooo...you want to say that my i7 2600k @ 3.4-4.0GHz with 8GB RAM 1333 OC @ 1600MHz is choking something ? I don't think so. After defrag no problems...weird coincidence or .... ? I even re-installed OS 3-4 months ago, clearing my PC every day with CCleaner, once per month of two I fully scan my PC for viruses with Anti-Malwarebytes program which does its work pretty good.

Sooo...coincidence ? Is it a fact that you are trying to state about HDD's reading speed or just a theory that you learned from reading somewhere or got in school told by teacher that hadn't doubts about things and has not tried to make sure if his theory is correct ?

Well for a cpu like that, not likely.

But same goes for the harddrive, even a raw bluray rip tends to be around just 30GB of video data.

In theatrical 2k it tends to be just around 30MB/s http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/128963-how-digital-technology-is-reinventing-cinema/2  Bluray is more in the teens to 40 ish Mb/s, megabits not bytes which is 8x less, and about 5Megs a second to show you how low a load that is.

http://www.storagereview.com/western\_digital\_caviar\_green\_2tb\_review\_wd20ears

even slow green drives read sequentially many times faster than whats necessary for video.

Anyways as I said dxva should be accelerating the decode via gpu.  If that fails to work right on a strangely encoded video it can jerk, and in such case run something like vlc player assuming you are playing an mkv or such file and decode it with cpu only to see if that solves the problem.

You might be able to trip it up if you random access the drive enough while its reading the movie, but you already said you have an ssd for os/apps so thats not likely.

Course the other possibility is your drive is failing, do a S.M.A.R.T. check on it, run your manufacturers diagnostics on it...  or simply let it defrag since any hard to read sectors will be reallocated if you are lucky, until it runs out of spare sectors of course.  I think stuff only reallocates on writes though.

And no, you don't need to run ccleaner each day, it might even be counter productive to wipe out your cache files like that.  This stuff is just fact, only a certain amount of data needs to be read to play a video file, and drives are much faster than that.  I'm sure a variant of your drive is benchmarked on storagereview if you look for it, and you can go look at its sequential read performance yourself.

My theories are varied because I can't read your mind, or see what you haven't told me, I can only guess based on the little information contained in your posts.

Sooo...you want to say that my i7 2600k @ 3.4-4.0GHz with 8GB RAM 1333 OC @ 1600MHz is choking something ? I don't think so. After defrag no problems...weird coincidence or .... ? I even re-installed OS 3-4 months ago, clearing my PC every day with CCleaner, once per month of two I fully scan my PC for viruses with Anti-Malwarebytes program which does its work pretty good.

Sooo...coincidence ? Is it a fact that you are trying to state about HDD's reading speed or just a theory that you learned from reading somewhere or got in school told by teacher that hadn't doubts about things and has not tried to make sure if his theory is correct ?