[MPlayer-users] Parsing whole Youtube mp4 file before playing?

[Rasz]

On 6/5/15, wm4 <nfxjfg at googlemail.com> wrote:
> libavcodec. It's because the mp4 file is "fragmented". It works if you
> disable indexing.

"fragmented" was a good clue
found http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18178405/mpeg-dash-and-fragmented-mp4
now I get it, its like hosting a bunch of mp4 files glued ass to
mouth, and mplayer insists on parsing every single one of them before
decoding anything.

I found a bug, or at least very undesirable result of the way mplayer
handles streams like that currently.
I tried VLC, it will also parse every single fragment, but VLC is
"clever" about it, it only fetches header data, 8MB out of 56MB file,
before it starts playing ("clever" in quotation marks because despite
fetching only essential data its doing it very slowly).
Mplayer on the other hand first fetches _whole_ file to parse
individual fragments .. and then it fetches that very same data again
while playing it, result is 112MB downloaded to watch 56MB stream.

It seems libavcodec is not at fault here, VLC uses it and acts differently?
I would still love to know how YT players are able to seamlessly start
playing without preloading anything :( Even better if there was a way
of incorporating it into mplayer, or at the very least copy VLC
"clever" method of only fetching essential (not that essential if YT
flash player can live without it) metadata.

-- 
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.