The cachemembuffersize in XBMC is the amount of bytes of memory used for buffering ahead in videos. They do warn, however, that XBMC will consume three times the amount of RAM than what is specified for this setting. So the default 5242880 bytes (= 5MB) is on the low side to ensure they don’t stress out your system too much. Since my system is dedicated solely for XBMC I had no qualms bumping this up to 524288000 bytes (= 500MB) given that I have 4GB of RAM on my machine. Something more conservative, however, might be 52428800 bytes (= 50MB).
How do you update the buffer amount? First close out of XBMC, and then navigate to your profile folder:
- Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/userdata/
- Windows: %appdata%\XBMC\userdata\
Once in your profile directory find and open up the advancedsettings.xml file, or create the file if it doesn’t already exist. Then you’ll want to add this node to the file:
<network>
<cachemembuffersize>5242880</cachemembuffersize>
</network>
The cachemembuffersize is set to the default 5MB so you will still need to update that after pasting it in. After you have updated the advancedsettings.xml file and saved the changes you can open up XBMC to see if your video playback has improved at all.