Different mechanism for caching videos

[jamievicary]

In my experience, a default install of VLC can often stutter when playing a video from a network share. (I'm not talking about streaming here, but opening a file from a directory on a shared folder or another computer.) This stuttering can be cured by increasing the caching time for file access; I often have to set this to be as high as 10 seconds. However, this has a serious side-effect: when you start watching a video, you have to wait for this amount of time before the video starts. Also, peculiarly, after pressing pause, you have to wait for this amount of time before playback terminates! Another frustration is having to go deep into the settings to change the caching value, which I want to be small when I watch a locally-stored video, and large when I watch a file somewhere else on the network.

An obvious solution is to modify VLC's caching behaviour, so that although it attempts to store X seconds of unplayed video in its memory, it will nonetheless start playing immediately. Also, there's really no reason why pausing shouldn't be immediate; it would be great if this could be changed.

I can watch videos over my LAN with MPlayer without these problems. Watching videos over a LAN is an awfully important thing to get right, and VLC would be excellent at it with this small change.

Cheers,
Jamie.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

VLC 1.0.0 pauses instantaneously, whatever the cache be.

[kirdie]

I have the exact same problem but with DVD playback while with the media player classic it works fine.
Does there exist a workaround or was this changed with the new version 1.0.1?