Hi,

I use WebDAV on my NAS to access files remotely over the internet. The WebDAV volume can be conveniently mounted on the remote machines (Win 10) at startup via net use and it works fine without any third-party tools. However, Windows' own WebDAV client implementation is very clunky. In particular, it appears that any access to the remote file (even a single click on it in the file explorer) requires it to download the entire file and cache it locally before being able to access any portion of the file. This makes WebDAV unusable with large files, for example playing a movie file few GB in size. I'm aware that WebDAV doesn't provide block access like SMB (though this could be emulated via download/resume), but there must be a smarter way to handle remote files, especially "streamable" ones like movie files.

Is there a way to control how WebDAV files are cached in the Windows WebDAV client, e.g. just cache a few MByte and download more on demand? Is there a better implementation of this with a third-party client? I know I could use SMB over VPN, but I prefer WebDAV if possible because it requires the least amount of setup (no VPN :)), is also encrypted and the performance is a bit better, since it has less overhead and can deal with the internet latency better than SMB.