[MPlayer-advusers] seeking thrashes cache and hammers server when playing movies from youtube, etc.

[The Wanderer]

Rich Felker wrote:

> hey guys,
> whenever i use mplayer to stream a movie from youtube, the flv
> demuxer seeks around multiple times during initialization, hammering
> the server and forcing the cache to refill several times, resulting
> in at least 30 seconds of delay before the movie actually plays. is
> there any way around this?

Dump the stream to a local file, probably in /tmp/, before you play it.

Which I always do anyway; it's the only way to be certain of avoiding
buffering issues, and it has other advantages as well (particularly over
embedded-video-in-Webpage playback, which is of course the default on
those sites) - not least that I then don't need to re-download it if I
decide I want to keep a local copy.

Admittedly it has the downside that you have an even longer wait before
the movie plays, but IMO the tradeoff is worth it.

> perhaps we need an option to treat the input file as nonseekable even
> if it is seekable (or flame whoever added http/ftp "seeking" to
> mplayer!) or perhaps the flv demuxer just needs to be fixed...? (that
> would be a lavf issue i suppose)

Fixing the FLV demuxer, if theoretically possible, would of course be a
good idea.

I see nothing wrong with providing a way to say "ignore seek requests
for this file". It might even be useful for other contexts than
streaming and FLV.

I'm not sure there's so much value in flaming somebody, but I'm not
likely to speak out strongly against it as long as it's entertaining
(and the target is not defenseless).

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.