Can all my spare RAM be used to mimimize hard drive activity

[Zaz]

Whenever I watch a movie on my computer, usually that is the single task I'm using that computer for.

This means that I have some 300 Mb of unused RAM sitting in the computer, and I was wondering if vlc could somehow use that memory as a buffer for the video file being read, to minimize hard drive activity.

Usually when the video is playing the harddrive is in use all the time, reading the file as it is played.
If instead of that the video player could store perhaps 30 minutes of the video file (before it's decompressed) in RAM, that would take a few minutes of loading, then there would be no hard drive activity for perhaps 20 minutes. And since I have very aggressive harddrive power-down timings set, that would mean that my hard-drives could be resting for half the time the movie is playing.

Would this work?
Is it possible to do using vlc?

[erazor02]

That would be a very usefull feature.

I got 2 gigs of RAM in my system and when watching video I have about 1.5 gigs of free memory doing just... well - nothing. In my observation the decoding of videofiles (I hereby exclude HD videos with 720p and above resolution) doesn't use very much RAM, so for me that could mean a whole movie without any harddiskactivity.

As a suggestion VLC could "reserve" a good part of the memory only for itself. Maybe a user-defined amount, maybe proportional to the overall amount of currently available RAM. Or the user pre-sets a maximum filesize (eg. 1024MB) for prefetching the video to RAM and files bigger than 1024MB would have to load several times from the disks.

Thanks for considering.

....and good job on VLC!

[Zaz]

The video player would of course have to make sure that the OS doesn't swap the memory back to the hard drive, since that would be counter productive.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

It will be possible for next version of VLC. Or partly indeed.

[Zaz]

Really? That's great. What is the feature called, and where can I read about how it works?