[MPlayer-users] Cache limit...

[rcooley]

On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 02:21:58 +0100
Ian Molton <spyro at f2s.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 21:46:20 -0700
> rcooley <rcooley at spamcop.net> wrote:
> 
> > Are you trying to say that there is no possible reason to use more
> > than 64MB of cache?  I certainly don't agree...
> 
> what conceivable reason could you have?

Allowing your media to spin-down.  A cache of 700MB (assuming you have
1GB of RAM or more) and your CD/VCD/SVCD/XCD can be read into cache in a
few minutes, then no more disc access is needed.

On a notebook, it's very nice to be able to load your 2 hour MPEG-4 file
into RAM, and letting the hard drive spin-down for 2 hours, rather than
having to waste power keeping it spinning for no reason.  

It's almost the same thing for DVDs or files on your hard drive that are
bigger than you can fit into RAM...  Instead of having the drive
constantly spinning for hours, it just needs to spin-up for a few
seconds to cache the data, then it can stay spun-down for 30 minutes or
so.

Good enough reason for you?

In fact, somebody made a large-cache patch for Xine for this very
reason.  MPlayer could be used very easily to do this, if not for the
pointless arbitrary restriction...