[aoaaron]

Okay, I cat5e most of my home network for XBMC...

however, I was just wondering, is their a program or plugin available which could transfer a file and then play it as opposed to streaming it whilst in XBMC or whilst maintaining XBMC's interface.

I hope I'm making sense but for example, a 720p rip of a 120 min movie will be about 5 or 6GB. Well within runtime, this file could have been transferred over and played. My question is it possible to transfer the file... and then play it whilst the rest is being brought over? For example, rather than constant buffering of a 720p encode over wifi, a 2-4 minute buffer and then boom! playback.

[Ned Scott]

Might be possible in the future. Internet streams can now be set in advancedsettings.xml (wiki) to cache to the disk, meaning if set it will try to download the whole file rather than as it goes. There's some changes that might go in after v12 Frodo is released that will enable cacheing for local network content, and if it works with the disk cache then that should do what you're asking here.

[aoaaron]

Yup! that would be perfect and is pretty much exactly what I'm asking for.

Any ETA at all in that? I'm guessing its atleast 6 months away?

[nickr]

If you have a cat5 network at home it should not be buffering at all.

[Vertigo]

As suggested by nickr, your network should be able to stream that file without any pausing, but since I have pretty much the same problem ( movies can be transferred way faster than realtime, but will stutter while playing over the LAN), Ive been doing some reading on the subject. It turns out the issue is cheap routers or switches that dont have enough shared, or per port buffer memory. Its one of those things most people dont look for on a spec sheet, thinking 1000T is 1000T. Well, its not. If you have an old/cheap router or switch between your NAS and XBMC box, see if taking it out or replacing it doesnt solve it.

edit: oops, you are talking about wifi? I guess the above is OT then