The VideoLAN Forums

I was wondering if VLC can preload streaming http/ftp items for seamless transitions between files.

For example, if you were given a VLC playlist or M3U playlist file and it had a sequential list of media files:

http://server.com/file.001.ts
http://server.com/file.002.ts
etc.

Is it 'currently' possible to preload/continuously load these http/ftp items that are in your playlist in order to facilitate the seamless transitions between the files that would likely be of the same content. Would tweaking the caching values allow this?

This would be a feature I would really like to see added if there isn't a way to do it right now.

Judging by the lack of a reply, I assume nothing like this feature exists and the more I thought about I can understand why.

Seems you would have to build a download manager into VLC to facilitate such a feature.

But wouldn't it be really cool to just cue up/setup a huge playlist of files from a website or any source that VLC supports and have it download(an option to save the downloads as well) and play them as they download. I doubt there is a way to have seamless transitions between files with the way the player is currently setup though, you would have to abstract the player from the file loader and just have the player read from a buffer.

I haven't looked the code at all, but maybe it wouldn't be to bad to look at some open source download managers and 'plugin' such a feature. You could even have a bunch of URL's to a sequence of RAR'd parts of a media file that could be played as they downloaded just like you currently can do.

I would appreciate if a developer might drop a message about this type of feature. I wouldn't mind making a feature like this for myself.