Ultrabuffer for smooth playback directly from CD ROM drive

[Amalfi Marini II]

I recently made a DVD->DivX convertion and I was amazed about the quality I’ve got, however, I’ve never imagined that this would be a problem when played direclty from a CD drive. The file was muxed with AC3 audio using AVI mux GUI which is excelent for making optimized AVI’s to be played directly from the Cdrom drive. The movie file is so heavy some times that the CD drive speed (mine 52X) is not enough, when playing the file from HD no problem. Is there any possibility to add to bsplayer a prebuffer feature that copies (pre-caches, pre-buffers, or however you want to call it) 40 or 50 MB of the movie in RAM memory ? so the movie plays smoothly as if it were played in the hard disk, while the CD rom drive only tries to maintain the buffer full. This way, the same way that Nero has that ultra buffer feature for burning a CD (same concept but in the other direction) can be quite revolutionary for a media player, not to mention that many bad muxed avi files will play smoothly. This will not only help movies to play well but imagine having 2 CD drives and a 2 CD's DivX movie, one CD in each drive. When 1 CD finishes the other one is already loaded in buffer so a perfect switch (maybe unnoticeable) between CD1 and CD2 can be made ! Of course these features can be turned off by user... well I hope you like these ideas and I hope you make them real. Now, the only real solution I tested is to include 2 audio stream in the AVI, for the one who's playing directly from the CD, he can select a VBR MP3, for the one who copied the movie to the hard disk, he can select AC3. Have you seen how good AC3 filter 0.68 is?(author's website: ac3filter.sourceforge.net ) I really recomend it, even if you don't have an 5.1 channel sound card, this filter will try to emulate that spatial effect. You can even enable quadro (2 front 2 rear speakers) mode for those with Sound Blaster PCI 128 and above, is still not 5.1 but it's better that normal stereo!
Well, that's all folks

[RTI]

maybe You should try to decrease speed of your CD drive to 8X - 12X, using for example CDBremse program http://www.cd-bremse.de/

[mmacchia]

I'd already thoght about a video buffer. Let's hope that BsPlayer will have it soon. I'd need it when playing on my slow LAN (10Mbit not always available). However I had non problem in playing my DIVX-AC3 directly from the CD-ROM drive. Check the Audio-Video Interleave settings (in Virtual Dub). There should be some suggested values for the interleaving depending from the AC3 bitrate. I I remember well the suggested interleaving for 384kbps ac3 is 512ms (but i'm not sure). Try

[Amalfi Marini II]

I didn't know I could interleave AC3 using virtual dub(the mod is exactly like nandub so it's flawed), but I though AVI mux GUI will help me and it didn't. I tried many configurations in the interleave but none helped... Anyway I still think the idea of an ultrabuffer is good, since sometimes when I visit some friend and I go with my DivX movies I try to play them and I always have a problem, if it's not the speed of the CD drive it's because the drive is dirty and in the middle of the movie it does some retrys. Then we have the famous LG CD rom Drive (LG 8522B) that you cannot set the spin down wait time value to your needs... So in any case the ultrabuffer can help.
And the most stupid thing I ever saw (you can notice it making a test) is that when I'm watching a movie with bsplayer (or anyplayer I think) and I just saw an awesome scene and I pause the movie to see it again, I skip back a little using the movie position slider, and the CD drive doens't make any read in the whole scene because it it's already loaded in memory, and it plays smoothly until it reaches the position I paused. So, if when you see a movie the player (or the codec, or windows) uses some RAM to allocate the frames you already saw, why not to use some ram to allocate those you haven't ???it's ridiculous. Why doesn't the CD rom take an advance to the movie? I think it should load what is coming and not load what it's happening, if you know what I mean.
Anyway I will try your suggestion I'll keep on trying