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Is it possible to force a media player to load an entire video to my RAM before attempting to play it?

I usually heavily multitask on my computer and sometimes run into the situation in which I'm watching parts of a movie and generating data from my thesis at the same time. There's nothing else to do while my programs generate data, so I watch a movie. However, my programs tend to be extremely hard disk drive-intensive and are constantly reading and writing to the hard drive. As a result, it conflicts with my media players and I end up with choppy movie.

I want to be able to load my video onto RAM directly from the hard drive and then play the video from RAM so that my media player and my programs do not compete for the same (and very slow) resources (the hard drive). Is there any way of doing this without having to go and mount a RAM drive?

Note, the bottleneck here is my hard drive speed, not my CPU or RAM, both of which have plenty of headroom to use.

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  • 1
    You could get a cheap extra HDD for your media, this has other advantages too.
    – Phoshi
    Jan 1, 2010 at 22:09
  • 2
    It would be a good idea to state what OS you use.
    – CarlF
    Jan 1, 2010 at 23:56

3 Answers 3

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If you have enough memory to spare, create a RAM disk large enough to hold a full movie and play it from there.

Which OS and player are you using? Some players allow to increase the buffer, which might solve your problem.

In VLC you can increase the buffer via file caching in menu Tools -> Preferences -> Input -> Access -> File.

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  • Currently using VLC. I have no experience with ram discs (other than i know they exist and the basic premise on how they operate) and i don't have enough spare RAM to allocate it permanently to a RAM disc. Ill look into increasing the buffer, basicaly that was what i wanted in the beginning i guess (entire video to RAM = 100% buffer...)
    – Faken
    Jan 1, 2010 at 21:47
  • which OS? Gavotte RAM Disk works with any 32-bit Windows, installation is plain and easy: mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/…
    – Molly7244
    Jan 1, 2010 at 21:50
  • Windows 7, 64-bit. Why would anyone be using a RAM disk on a 32-bit OS? Your already pretty limited by the 4GB limit to start with...
    – Faken
    Jan 1, 2010 at 21:52
  • oh, i could name tons of reasons to use a RAM disk, anyway, if you don't want to use a RAM disk, fiddle with the video buffer settings in VLC.
    – Molly7244
    Jan 1, 2010 at 22:02
  • ahh, Wil, by "memory-disk application" you could have referred to something like FlashPoint which will use system memory as disk cache (quite popular in the netbook scene to overcome issues with slow MLC SSDs). if you mean RAM disk you should say RAM Disk :)
    – Molly7244
    Jan 1, 2010 at 22:11
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Not that I know of.... I have seen a few codecs where you can adjust memory usage, but not load a whole movie into memory before you play.

The two solutions I can think of are either installing a memory-disk application, or even easier perhaps you could get a USB stick and just copy the file to that then play from there?

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  • That might work as well, so long as the bit rate doesn't exceed the memory stick's read capacity, which it shouldn't. Only problem would be having to wait for the file to transfer over to the USB stick. I usually only get about 5MB/s transfer rates (writing) to the stick, which means some waiting would be involved (which is not an issue for HD to RAM which moves at over 70MB/s in sequential read mode).
    – Faken
    Jan 1, 2010 at 21:50
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I use IMDisk Toolkit to create a dynamically-allocated RAM disk. I have it set to 6GB of size which is how the OS sees it, but if there is nothing on the disk (such as on boot), then it takes about 12MB of RAM according to Windows (10) Task Manager (I have 8+GB to play with). The RAM usage increases 1:1 with the size of every file on the RAM disk and deleting a file frees up the RAM within seconds.

I can then load my videos (movies, shows) in their entirety to R: and then my HDD can go back to sleep for the next couple of hours while I watch the videos from RAM. In your case, the HDD could then be used for other things, but I wanted to use it for energy and HDD lifetime considerations (Task Manager shows that the HDD is no longer searching 1% every ~6 seconds and my external HDD light turned off signifying sleep).

I also like it because it does not affect fresh boot time or shutdown time as the disk starts empty upon boot and saves nothing upon shutdown (scripts can be written to do this though). It does, however, affect hibernate up and down times, which is my usual "off" state.... Gotta remember to delete the files before I hibernate....

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