Poor performance playing Windows Media files from network ..

Hello,

I've noticed that Windows Media Player 9 for MacOS X peforms
surprisingly poorly when streaming a media file from a network-mounted
volume over a half-duplex ethernet or Wi-Fi connection. Dropouts and
stalled playback is unavoidable with all but the lower-bandwidth files,
I've found.

This is a major issue to me, as I am attempting to move my users' home
directories from diverse workstations to a central AFP server. This move
cannot affect end-station usability, and in WMP's case, it demonstrably
does. I have observed this problem with Quicktime Player and RealOne
Player as well, although it is not severe enough with those players to
cause too much trouble - with WMP, it's a showstopper.

My guess is that the problem occurs because WMP streams the file during
playback, and either does not check or is prevented from learning that
the file is not on a local drive. As such, WMP does not adjust its
buffer cache to compensate the network jitter caused by ethernet
collisions and TCP retransmissions that are endemic to half-duplex
ethernet and Wi-Fi networks, resulting in dropouts.

It appears that the buffer adjustment preference does not help; it only
affects the buffer size when the player is streaming directly over a
network protocol such as http or mms. To confirm, I shared the test file
via HTTP instead of AFP, entered the URL into the Open URL dialog and
played back the file with no problems; mounting the volume via AFP and
open the file in WMP directly produced choppy playback.

There are two easy (IMO) developer fixes for this: 1. If permitted by
the OS, code a mechanism within WMP to detect the type of volume the
file is being accessed from (local or network) and set the appropriate
(read: larger) buffer size if the volume is not local. 2. Allow the
Buffering preference option to affect buffering for file streaming as
well as network streaming.

I'd like to bring this issue to the attention of the Microsoft MBU, but
have no information about how to go about doing this. If anyone has
suggestions, please post here.

Thanks,

-Chris