Any player where I can load entire video into memory?

[mvalpreda]

I do a bit of traveling and am always looking for ways to increase the battery life on my laptop. I was thinking I could save battery life by loading an entire video (DivX or Xvid) into memory so the hard drive can go to sleep. Is there a program that does this? Or a setting in WMP 11 on XP?

[kutjong]

I don't think so. I think it would also require much HDD activity (battery life) to pass a 700mb film into system RAM so the benefits would be negligible.

[mvalpreda]

I was thinking to transfer 700mb to memory would take 10-15 seconds maybe......and that sounds like it would be less hard drive activity than little blips over ~90minute movie.

[setarip_old]

Hi!

I would imagine that if you mounted such files to a virtual drive, this may accomplish your purpose...

[cyberbeing]

Hi!

I would imagine that if you mounted such files to a virtual drive, this may accomplish your purpose...

I think you mean a RAM disk? If you stick your video on a RAM disk (which is a drive in RAM) then I think that would accomplish what you want. The only problem with that is that whatever size you set the RAM disk for, that memory can't be used by the rest of the system and obvously all data is lost in RAM when you power off your computer.

I like the free RAM disk program called RRamDisk which can be downloaded from this site:
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server/

Truthfully, under normal conditions I don't think you would notice much of a difference by sticking the entire video in RAM except for seeking performance. Now if you were doing something like defragmenting, which abuses your hard drive, then there might be a noticeable difference.