Quote:

Quote:
It would have to be a very poorly written video player application to require the entire file to be loaded into memory first.

The sound recorder/wav player app in Windows (before Media Player) used to load the entire wav file into memory before playing it...

As I said, poorly written I doubt they envisioned anybody recording anything serious with it so they just went for the easy option.

Most video formats are all split up into chunks internally anyway. Especially with the MPEG series of codecs which encode as a variety of frame types so you can go through only reading parts as necessary off the media.

If you had to load an entire video file into memory for playback then every DVD player would have to require at least 1GB of RAM to store each VOB. You'd probably need 9GB since reading in 1GB at a time would take awhile and you don't want your film to suddenly stop part the way through to cache the next VOB.

I've created 10GB files before by importing video from a miniDV camera. No problems at all when using a NTFS partition and unfortunately I don't have 10GB of RAM so it isn't loading it into memory.