file Caching/Buffering ?

[brashquido]

Hi There,

I've had a look at Daemon Tools and find it very interesting. I like to play my DVD's in PowerDVD XP over my LAN and to date haven't had any trouble. Recently I've moved to an 11mbps wireless LAN which while still fast enough for DVD playback, it seems to suffer from inconsistent available bandwidth making DVD playback jerking at times.

The only way I can think of to get around this is to have some kind of buffer on the client PC that the DVD software uses to read from that this jerking can be avoided. I would suspect something like this wouldn't take too much of any system resource apart from RAM? I have no idea though as I've only ever done VERY basic C++ and assembler programing, and that was over 8 years ago.

I was thinking, as Daemon Tools is the vitual drive mounting point, this would be the logical place to have this file buffering, and I think it'd be a great feature to have if it's possible to build it into it at all. I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who plays back DVD over a LAN, and I'm sure I'm not the only one with the same available bandwidth problem.

I spose my questions are;

(a) Would building file caching/buffering ability into daemon tools be possible?

(b) If it were possible, would you consider building this in?

[Andareed]

Venom will have to answer this question.

But imo, daemon tools should not be the caching program. I think it is better that some other driver do this for all data across lan. I think that probably such a tool already exists, and may be built into your lan driver.

[brashquido]

Thanks for the reply Andareed,

Whatever does the buffering would have to be transparent to the end product, otherwise I don't see how it would work. The LAN driver is definately an angle I hadn't thought of. Just looked at the file and print sharing properties for my Intel PRO 10/100 on my work machine, and it actually has a "recieve buffers" selection with an editable value. I wonder if this would have any effect, and if my wireless card (Dlink 520+) supports something similar?

[DevX]

I think that DVD playing software has task of buffer precaching if it sees that CDROM is slow enough. The same may happen on old crappy CDROM.

[NeTsurFer]

or maybe u use WEP encryption for the connection and the card and or CPU is to slow to encode 11Mbps constantly ?!

[brashquido]

At first I thought it would be better for the DVD playing software (in this case PowerDVD) to do the caching as well, but when I queried Cyberlink about this, their come back was that it didn't support playback over the network, and I was in violation of the EULA by doing so. Which I think is a load of BS because I only have the one install of PowerDVD, it shouldn't matter where the source files are coming from, but that's another story. I like the idea of the crappy old CD-ROM though, anything below an 8X CD-ROM could have throughput problems for mini DVD playback.

The CPU is Celeron 466 which maybe a bit slow, but I do have a PIII 550 which I can swap it with, but I don't think I have WEP enabled atm.