New install issues

[Brownsamurai]

I'm doing the trial of Mezzmo (coming over from TVersity) and have a fairly simple setup, but seem to be having some issues I was hoping some folks could help out with. I did some searches on the forum, but because of the general nature (and being unable to pin down the problem with an error) I wasn't able to find the obvious answer. If you answered it in another post - thanks in advance!

I have four established Windows 8 Pro clients and a dedicated Windows 8 Pro machine (x64) for Mezzmo (fresh install) - they are all in the same homegroup, on the same network segment, and there are no firewalls in between the clients. If I attempt to stream to a DLNA device (ie. Xbox 360), Mezzmo seems to work just fine. If I expand the computer object in Explorer, the Mezzmo server does appear as expected. Navigating down through that using the Mezzmo object (Computer\Mezzmo\Video\Folders\Video\Horror) I can see the videos in the leaf window. If I double click on the video, Windows Media Player opens but the player does nothing for a while (no image and the play button is grayed out) then errors out with "C00D11B1". That points to an audio driver issue, but if I share the folder the video resides in to the homegroup, I can direct navigate to the share through Explorer and it plays just fine. This happens at each Windows 8 workstation.

As a part of my troubleshoting, if I do it on a Windows 7 machine - the Mezzmo server shows up under "Other Libraries", I can navigate to the video, and the file plays after about 10 minutes of the "busy" icon...progress...but the audio stutters. The Mezzmo server is an 8 core machine running at 3.1 Ghz with 16 GB of RAM. Disks are setup in a Storage Pool with a parity drive (so, basically RAID 5). It should have no problems serving it up.

If I play the same video locally on the Mezzmo machine within Explorer, it also plays fine (audio and video). If I navigate to the Media object in Networks, it also lets me move to the folder in Media Player and will play the audio of the video, but does not display video (just the thumbnail).

Couple of quick adds: Avast Antivirus and Shark007 Codec Pack is installed...other than that its very vanilla.

I'm sure this is something simple - a checkbox or a setting, but until I can get this resolved its holding me back from purchasing Mezzmo. Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!