Okay, I have this setup and ready to go (and purchase), am very pleased with what I've been able to manage so far. The only thing left is that all my MKV files have black thumbnail. ONLY MKV files appear this way -- mp4, avi, mov, all appear perfectly fine. In Windows Explorer, the mkvs all show thumbnails. I'm running Windows 8.1.
Now if I disable the Directory Opus Movie plugin and refresh Directory Opus thumbnail cache, then MKV thumbnail appears...but then of course I lose the Preview Pane functionality, which I'd really like to have, since I used Window Explorer preview pane often.
Is there a solution I'm missing here? I understand Directory Opus has plug-ins -- maybe there is an alternate video previewer that I can install?
Any help would be greatly appreciated, I really want this software but I gotta get this quirk resolved first. Thanks in advance!!
If you enable the Movie plugin and then click Configure on it, you'll find an option to tell it not to generate thumbnails. Then you can use it as a viewer but not for thumbnails.
Note that if the thumbnails are coming from the Windows shell, then it's also going to be the Windows shell that caches them. (Opus doesn't waste space in its own thumbnail cache to cache things that it knows the shell will also cache.) So if you are trying to avoid being subject to the shell's caching, you may not want to do this.
If you look at the Movie plugin's other options, there are ones for skipping black frame at the start of the video, which may help (but can also slow things down when generating movie thumbnails). Different codecs/splitters can also help (remember that Opus will need 64-bit ones, if you're using 64-bit Opus).