Large file support
20 June 2002

OS

Linux 2.4.16 appears to have no problem supporting very large files -- I've tried 12GB with no problems. Strictly speaking, you may want to use ext3 for this -- see file systems. Note that FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit; the ext2 and ext3 is supposedly 2GB (see comparison), but in practice this is not true.

There is a configuration file at /etc/security/limits.conf for setting arbitrary limits for each user; it is currently not doing anything.

NFS

NFS v3 handles large files fine -- at some point you could look into the currently experimental v4. My old userspace NFS only supported v2 and max 2GB files but this is history.

avi

Apparently avi files follow two standards: AVI 1.0 and AVI 2.0. The first has a file size limit of 2GB, the second does not. I've asked the kino developers what they have implemented. See background info.

dvgrab

No problems making large files -- at least up to12GB.

avimerge

Again, no problems.

kino

kino is being changed to support very large files, but as of 20 June it's not consistently working.

mplayer

Appears to handle files at least up to 2.5GB and possibly larger -- it's unclear if it will really play them past 1GB. Note that you may need to compile with --enable-large-files!

aviplay

Aviplay has a limit somewhere around 1GB perhaps? or 2GB? Not fully tested. You can make a request to the developer to support larger files.