Does VLC preload playlist videos ?

[Richie-01]

Hi everybody,
I am looking for a technical information but couldn't find it anywhere on the web yet ...

I have a playlist of lets say 30 music videos. I know VLC "parses" the playlist upon loading it. Not a native speaker ... my understanding: VLC is reading the *meta data* of all video files included in the playlist. But not video data itself ?

My application requires that any of these videos starts immediately, when triggered. From the technical point of view this could be achieved, if VLC automatically preloads a small portion of each video contained in the playlist. That could avoid any buffering delays.
Rough estimation: If a 3 min mp4 Video has about 180MB, that's about 1MB per second. So preloading 5 seconds times 30 videos would require 30*5*1MB = 150MB
Sounds reasonable to me ... ?

Since I cannot find any documentation ... is this buffer preload implemented ? Or can I configure VLC in a way to do so, when loading a playlist ?

Thanks a lot in advance
Richie

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Your question boils down to whether VLC can preload data into buffers before VLC is started. Well, obviously not; VLC can't do anything before it's started, by definition.

[Richie-01]

Hi Rémi,
thanks a lot for you reply. Much appreciated.
As a non native speaker some vocabulary is not as "obvious" to me, ... sorry for that ...

Depends on what "started" means. Obviously the program _is_ started when I load a playlist. Obviously it _does_ load data when parsing the playlist.
From a technical point of view:
Prefetching data does not require video playback. (Generally speaking)
The hint which data to load is indexed in the playlist. The amount of data could fit into RAM.

So - from the technical point of view - I cannot see any limit generally prohibiting a video player from preloading some video data.
As long as the size of the playlist is kept reasonably small, of course. Hence the rough estimation of required memory in the first posting.

Thanks a lot for clarification !
Richie

[Richie-01]

Hi all,
since there has been no scientifically satisfying reply so far ... Maybe we can approach the issue the other way:
Is there an estimation what buffering timespan to expect on an average computer, which is not occupied with other user invoked tasks apart from running VLC ?

You have a playlist loaded, click on one of the videos - what is the delay to be expected until the video is running ?

I know this is hardware dependent and influenced by background tasks - therefore just expecting a rough estimation (like "between 10ms and 250 ms") .. ?

Thanks & best regards
Richie