[vampire666]

I was wondering if there's an option or a way to make xbmc automatically copy the file (movie/mp3) on the client pc before playing it.

The scenario I'm talking about is of a xbmc server which serves it's content through the home network. Copying the file from the xbmc server to the client pc will have the obvious disadvantage of having the content available only after the file is copied, but the advantage of having the server's full potential ready for other tasks (if I'm watching a movie the network bandwidth and hard disk of the server is used throughout the entire movie), not to mention the fact that the hard disk on the server can go in idle mode and therefore less power is consumed.
I guess that if there's a heavy usage of the server there might be stuttering that would be avoided if the content is first copied on the client.

What do you think?
Thank you for your time.

[Rick P.]

Serving files (or pieces of them) takes very little in the way of resources - if doing so interferes with your server's ability to do other stuff there's something wrong with your setup. The only benefit i see this having is the potential ability of the drive or even the server to sleep after the file has transferred. The tradeoff is that now your PC drive can't sleep because XBMC is constantly reading from it (bits pulled from the server would likely be cached in RAM until required).
As for network bandwidth, except for 1980's vintage 10-base T, Arcnet or bad wifi I don't see this as an issue either. Call me impatient but even though I have a decent network I would personally find it very annoying to have to wait the 100 seconds for my 10 MB movie to be copied before I could watch it.

[User 172595]

OK, so let's say that we'd actually want this feature, what would be the best way to do it? Some work-around script, or possibility of coding an XBMC plug-in which would add a context menu item "Copy to disk and play" - question for the XBMC developers here - how much work would that be? I have no experience...

The reason why this would be useful for me is that I'm planning to get a Raspberry Pi for XBMC. Too complicated to set up Ethernet cables in my current apartment, so I'll just go with WiFi from NAS. From what I've read, this is far from ideal, but I'm guessing I'll manage, since 90% of the time I'm watching 720p TV shows. But for that 10% when I'd like to watch a 1080p movie, it would be nice to have the Copy First feature for better playback on the RPi.

Thanks in advance!

[wsnipex]

should be rather straight forward to write a python addon/script to do that.

[Ned Scott]

It should also be possible once some stuff gets worked out for caching. We now have local drive cache for files since v12, and nightlies have local file sharing caching enabled, so we just need the final golden bit: force the cache to load even when it thinks it doesn't need to: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/2901