Smarter Caching

[calv]

I have a cheap and slow NAS device, that I use for my video files. It shares them via SMB. When I use 300ms caching, then playback works most of the time, but sometimes gets stuck. When I use bigger values, that doesn't happen, but seek performance goes down. It seems that VLC tries to fill the buffer completely before starting playback, which is generally not needed. For me the best solution would be, that I can set the buffer size to a big value, like 1000ms or bigger, but set a smaller value, like 200ms or less as a "buffer status" for starting playback. This way I would have the maximum responsiveness and will still have a 1000ms "read ahead" for any later point in playback.

[calv]

No comments on this?

I think that everybody will profit from this feature, because the startup time until playback starts and the seek delay would be considerably less in almost any case.

On the technical side it should also be no big task to implement this, because the buffer needs to be constantly filled during playing anyway. So this would just be a change in the "start playing trigger" from "buffer full" to "buffer at n %". Without knowing the VLC internals, I would guess that around 80% of the work would be user interface (just add that option). Also, if no active developer is interested in implementing this, I could try, if someone points me to the right code place.

Any comments? I don't want to rush anybody, but other requests no matter how stupid they were received an answer...

[fenrir]

I have vastly improved startup time and seek latency even with really high buffering value in git master.

[hschulze]

I just posted a set of ideas on this topic in a related thread viewtopic.php?f=7&t=45778

Actually, I think it would be even cooler, to have a cache that has some history in it, so slow forward/pause/slow rewind could be seamless to network lag.

[wpietri]

Any news on this? I'm running VLC 0.9.9a-2ubuntu, and would love something similar.

In my case, I notice two problems that make me want better caching. One is the occasional short wifi glitch I'll get while watching video or listening to music off my home server. I'd much rather have VLC use an extra 50 MB of memory if it means a smoother experience.

The other is when watching DVDs. If I pause a DVD, my laptop DVD drive will spin down. When I start watching again, the video and audio will be mangled until the drive has spun back up. This can also happen when I jump back to look at a scene again. If I'm watching a movie, I'm not really doing anything else with my computer, so VLC using 500 MB of cache would be fine with me.

Although the actual numbers would vary for others, I think the general approach of having a smarter cache would give a lot of people a better experience.