Writing video file and simultaneously playing it

Question

In my fun project, I\'m downloading video file from youtube, and writing to a file on local disk. Simultaneously I want to play it. The objective is to cache the file on loc

Answer 1

VLC supports playback of incomplete files, so if you're up for a bit of non-blocking I/O and/or parallel code, you should be able to start the download and after a sufficient amount has been written, use LibVLC to start playback. Depending on what compression algorithm is used, you may need to buffer enough so that there's always several seconds of data left in the buffer -- if I recall correctly, some of the more modern algorithms record deltas and index information going forward and backward.

You may get a few warnings / error messages / Exceptions, but I would not assume that they're fatal -- let the playback quality be your guide!

This is somewhat similar to some of the suggestions from the comments above, and is also related to a lot of what @abarnert said, to a lesser extent some of the exchange with @StackedCrooked.