[MPlayer-users] Cache limit...

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 07:47:27PM -0700, rcooley wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 02:21:58 +0100
> Ian Molton <spyro at f2s.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 21:46:20 -0700
> > rcooley <rcooley at spamcop.net> wrote:
> > 
> > > Are you trying to say that there is no possible reason to use more
> > > than 64MB of cache?  I certainly don't agree...
> > 
> > what conceivable reason could you have?
> 
> Allowing your media to spin-down.  A cache of 700MB (assuming you have
> 1GB of RAM or more) and your CD/VCD/SVCD/XCD can be read into cache in a
> few minutes, then no more disc access is needed.
> 
> On a notebook, it's very nice to be able to load your 2 hour MPEG-4 file
> into RAM, and letting the hard drive spin-down for 2 hours, rather than
> having to waste power keeping it spinning for no reason.  
> 
> It's almost the same thing for DVDs or files on your hard drive that are
> bigger than you can fit into RAM...  Instead of having the drive
> constantly spinning for hours, it just needs to spin-up for a few
> seconds to cache the data, then it can stay spun-down for 30 minutes or
> so.

Are you sure that reading the whole disc in a few minutes at 80x or
whatever speed actually uses less power than streaming the movie as
you play it at 1x? (hdparm -E 1 /dev/cdrom). I suspect the power
consumption is comparable either way, and I'd much rather run at 1x
and avoid the "buzzsaw" sound for the first 5 minutes of the movie.

Rich