Question: Is it possible to force a media player to load an entire video to my RAM before attempting to play it?

I usually heavily multitask on my computer and sometimes run into the situation in which I’m watching parts of a movie and generating data from my thesis at the same time. There’s nothing else to do while my programs generate data, so I watch a movie. However, my programs tend to be extremely hard disk drive-intensive and are constantly reading and writing to the hard drive. As a result, it conflicts with my media players and I end up with choppy movie.

I want to be able to load my video onto RAM directly from the hard drive and then play the video from RAM so that my media player and my programs do not compete for the same (and very slow) resources (the hard drive). Is there any way of doing this without having to go and mount a RAM drive?

Note, the bottleneck here is my hard drive speed, not my CPU or RAM, both of which have plenty of headroom to use.

Answer: If you have enough memory to spare, create a RAM disk large enough to hold a full movie and play it from there.

Which OS and player are you using? Some players allow to increase the buffer, which might solve your problem.

In VLC you can increase the buffer via file caching in menu Tools -> Preferences -> Input -> Access -> File.