straming from http - have VLC continue downloading in the bg

[mastabog]

I am playing some mp4 video via http using VLC. It all works fine except one aspect which I might be missing. Is there an option to have VLC continue downloading in the background after playing has started?

This is similar to what YouTube used to do in the past: you clicked "play", then the player would download the full stream in the background while playing, making seeks easier. Windows Media Player does this, and is quite handy for several reasons:

- allows seeing ahead a bit without rebuffering
- if on a slower connection, at the limit of the video's bitrate, it allows one to pause the video for a bit and the play without hiccups

I noticed VLC stops after the buffer is full and is trying to maintain a full buffer but in my case it ends up rebuffering a lot as the video streams have highly variable bitrates.

I know I can enlarge the buffer size, but that's not the same thing as it makes it slow to start, and slow to rebuffer.

Playing the same mp4 video with WMP, I'm getting a much smoother playback allowing small seeks while playing, and it also rebuffers faster when seeking beyond the background download point. I'd like to use VLC instead of WMP when playing http streams.

Cheers

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Unfortunately, not at the moment.