Ethyriel wrote:Or, perhaps if the media player is in the process of updating metadata.
I would hope that the player would not be touching the metadata unless you've explicitly edited it! For it to do otherwise would arguably be a bug.
michael_d wrote:I know for a fact that an open MS Access DB can easily be corrupted by sudden network/power outage. Even though the client is not writing to the database and just keeps it open. Potentially the same could be applied to other types of files that opened across network.
OP specifically mentioned playing movies from the server; I assumed that this was the use case he was worried about. Using an Access database is a very different animal from streaming a movie; since Access is entirely file-based (no server process), record/table locking is done by touching the database file(s) themselves.
michael_d wrote:Also opportunistic locking can cause corruption if file server OS is any of the folowing: Vista, Windows 7, Windows 2008. There is a registry key that needs to be set to disable it.
I was not aware of this issue; but all of the info I've been able to find in a few minutes of Googling seems to indicate that it only affects applications which modify files on the server. Do you have any evidence that it happens even if the client is not modifying the files? If so, then this is a *major* defect in the implementation of op locks!
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To the OP: I still think the risk is tiny. If you're concerned about any of the above issues, make the share(s) used by the HTPC read-only.