Hi and congratulations because mplayer is nice!
But there is a thing related with the cache usage, I think that it is
very far from being optimal.
I usually store my movies in a USB disk and I watch a movie using, for example:
mplayer -cache 8000 my_movie.avi
Watching the information numbers that mplayer puts in the console I
see that the last percentage number starts
in 99% and it goes down to 50%, I think that this number represents
the cache usage.
But, under the 50%, mplayer starts to make a lot of calls to the USB
disk for filling only a 1% of the cache, keeping
the cach? between 49% - 51%. So a lot of reads per second are performed.
Obviously, my USB disk is in danger of burning in fire.
I think that the optimal purpose of a cache is preventing the
excessive access to a slower storage (hard disk).
So I think that the cache should go down from 99% to the 10% and under
this 10% it should refill itself quickly
to the 99% again, minimizing the disk access usage.
Looking at the code I see that in "stream/cache2.c" I see that a
thread is created and used to refill the cache,
basically, I think that it is the code that the thread performs.
do {
if(!cache_fill(s)){
usec_sleep(FILL_USLEEP_TIME); // idle
}
// cache_stats(s->cache_data);
} while (cache_execute_control(s));
But, How can I change the code to get a better performance of mplayer's cache.
I'm using a Ubuntu Linux 8.04 and the mplayer svn r30137.
Thanks!
