Any chance of a drive spin down timeout value?

[Roycal]

I do completely understand the reason for wanting that. i.e no jitter on playback after pause.

It still sounds like the best solution would be a software player that is hardware indpendent and buffers the playback until the drive spins up on it's own. I had the impression that some of the software players you have tried do that and others don't do that so well.

All I am saying is that if you start messing with the hardware drivers, you could shorten the life of the drive. But if you can do the same thing with buffering video to wait for the spin ups' then you have accomplished the same thing with player software without messing with the hardware's operating parameters.