[MPlayer-users] playing / pausing a growing media file without restarting

[David L. Emerson]

I wrote a script to download a video from youtube, and play it with mplayer 
while it is still downloading. But I am having a problem:

If I use command-line mplayer, and if the download rate is too slow, then 
mplayer exits when it gets to the end of the stream. Then I have to go find the 
file and manually run mplayer again, and manually seek to the location where it 
stopped. This is of course very annoying.

So I tried the graphical gmplayer, but gmplayer is even more stupid: If 20 
seconds of content have been downloaded when gmplayer is started, then even if 
the download speed is faster than the playback speed, gmplayer stops playing at 
that 20 second mark. It's like it makes a copy of the file as it exists when 
playback is started, instead of accessing the file (which is growing ... 
command-line mplayer doesn't seem to have any problem doing this)

I guess my preference would be to use command-line mplayer, but is there a way 
to get it to PAUSE playback if it reaches the end of a file, and resume 
(manually or automatically) FROM THAT POINT when the file grows? Maybe some 
option to pass it?

Alternately, is there a way to make gmplayer look at the real file it's playing 
instead of making a copy (or whatever it's doing?)

Thanks,
David