[MPlayer-users] Disk usage in Mplayer and Mencoder

[Jean-Louis Debert]

> > I guess mplayer gets smaller chunks of data than ogle or 
> other progs.
> > As long as the speed is the same i wont worry about it.
> 
> yes.
> and if he wants bigger chunks, just use -cache <chunksize>

No, and NO.
  
I did tell you, in my posting, that I _did_ try several values
for -cache  (ranging from near-zero to 64MB) and it did _not_
change anything: with the big cache, the drive spins a lot
at the beginning (to fill the cache) but then when the cache
occupation stabilizes around 50%, the accesses are _exactly_
like they were with no big cache (presumably because the program
tries hard to maintain this 50% value).

IMHO the -cache value is the _total_ cache size and has not much 
to do with _chunk_ size for reading, at least this is what I think,
and what the program's behaviour seems to confirm.