When I try to open a really big avi file from the HD (around 260mb), even if I set the cache to only 1mb, it takes ages for it to open - I eventually quit with ctrl+c. What could be wrong?
On my desktop mplayer I usually get this when the file in question is "incomplete". Say you're downloading a 500MB avi file, and you only managed to get 200MB of it. If you play this truncated under mplayer (and indeed even windoze media player) it will scan the whole file before starting to play. Usually these incomplete files does not allow you to skip back and forth (although with various combinations and versions of mplayer and kmplayer that functionality seem to appear and disappear).
Now on a modern desktop, scanning a few hundred MB shouldn't take too long, but for the Z I'm sure it'll be a different matter.
So are you saying
all files over a certain does not play at all, or only
some files. FWIW I just tried a 300MB+ file from CF and it worked fine, it starts playing within about 5 seconds.
-- cheers