Sound Stutter

Hello all,

I recently got a Raspberry Pi 3 and loaded RetroPie and the optional install of Kodi (whatever the version was in December 2016). I keep all my movies on a hard drive connected to a computer upstairs and SMB share my hard drives to the Pi. I have never seen a buffering message come up. I am having two issues –

1. High quality stuff like my copy of “Planet Earth” stutters video where it’s completely unwatchable and there is no audio. I get no error messages during this “playback”.

2. Any other movie or TV show in my collection, even downloaded YouTube videos the sound will cut out for a half second at random, but continuously. This is particularly annoying if I’m watching a concert. Again, no messages.

I live in the mountains so my fastest internet is only 12mbps – is the SMB share the problem?

I read about hard drives being plugged in to the Pi then becoming unusable on a PC. I have no problem putting a movie on my hard drive and physically moving it to the Pi — I just want the hard drive to be able to accessed on my desktop and Pi as I load new movies every once in a while and I would hate to have my hours of ripping BR and DVDs go to waste and basically only be accessible through the Pi.

I’m sure you can tell from my wording I’m not super advanced in this stuff, but I can try anything with some instruction.

Thanks for your help with this issue!