I've been using VLC Player for quite a while now, and I've consistently had one issue with the software. Most of the videos I play that are any large size (TV Shows, DVD Rips, etc...) tend to stutter every few seconds after a while, or at least a few times a minute. At first I thought it was the player, and that there might be a solution, but I tried some forum solutions to no avail. Tonight my friend gave me a 4 Gb movie for us to all watch off of his portable hard drive, and again the same issue presented itself. My friend told me that it may in fact be hardware related (CPU or something lagging). Finally, we got fed up, and he tried playing the file directly off of his external drive, and it worked!

I'm starting to think that these issues I've been having are related to the fact that I am running a 0+1 RAID configuration of 4 320 Gb HDDs. Maybe it's the extra read time that's causing it to stutter? That's the only thing I can think of that would have been solved by using an external drive. If so, does anyone have any ideas as to how to solve this problem? This is my multimedia PC, so this is kind of what it's FOR, lol. Thanks!

It must be something to do with your H/D's and RAID setup but I have no idea why.

Could be something as simple as a loose or dodgy sata cable, I had a slow death sata cable that made my PC boot slowly and only showed up 100% when it wouldn't boot. Just double check everything to be sure, it's a long shot but worth checking.

I dunno if there are any more specific to RAID forums around that might have a better wealth of knowledge

I dunno... I recently replaced the SATA cables (like a months ago) not because of this issue, but the problem existed before this too, so I doubt it.