I've recently noticed a problem with Directory Opus. It seems that it will ocasionally take over 100% of my CPU and need to be terminated from the task manager.
I figured out that this is caused by incomplete, corrupt or non-standard videos, audio or images. When it tries to extract a preview or information (bit rate, size, length ect) it chokes and ends up running up the CPU.
The problem is that it's hard for me to insure that I have no problem files on my drive. Any time something is downloaded from bittorrent or an extension is misslabled it will cause this problem. Some of my videos cause this problem, and it doesn't seem worth it to me to reencode all of them to fix a codec glitch. Also, any time I browse a temp directory there is bound to be some similar files.
Is there any way I can force Opus to use the explorer viewer (it doesn't seem to have this problem).
or can I tell it to, in effect "try to extract a preview, but if you can't, then just forget it"
You may be able to solve the problem by removing unneeded video codecs and updating those that you do need/want.
As far as I know it's not Opus itself that goes crazy but the video codec that it calls into. Seems to happen more with some codecs than others, and there with some versions of codecs more than other versions of the same codec. I've seen it happen with Media Player Classic as well as Opus.
If you find a problem file you should be able to then find out which codec is being used for it. (A tool called "GraphEdit" can tell you exactly which video and audio codecs are used for a particular file if you're not sure.) That should give an indication of the codec that needs updating or nuking from orbit.
You could also disable the movie plugin and try adding the video extensions to the ActiveX plugin instead. That will then attempt to use Windows Media Player to play the movies in the viewer pane.
For comparison, I've tried creating thumbnails for some video files with XnView, which also relies on system codecs, and I must admit it copes with the task much better that DOpus (not to mention the feature of skipping a bit of file from the beginning, not to show just black square which many video files start with).
I was able to consistently completely disable thumbnail creation until DOpus restart, which is not a good thing.
I have not tried the trick with disabling movie plugin in favour of ActiveX however.
The movie plugin can also skip black frames when generating thumbnails. Not sure if it's on or off by default.
I still contend that it's the codecs which are at fault, and I've seen varying stability (from completely stable to frequently locking up) depending on which version of FFDShow I have installed, for example. But maybe other programs cope better than Opus when codecs go crazy.
Maybe, at least for thumbnail generation, Opus should call codecs in an entirely separate process which it can kill if the thumbnail isn't returned after a given amount of time and the process stops responding?
That sounds like a much better solution. Windows Explorer has something similar--it can use separate explorer.exe processes for the Windows Shell and for Windows Explorer. That way if one instance gets corrupted it can be killed separately, with less loss of work. This was very valuable in earlier windows versions. (In Windows XP both explorer.exe processes can be killed and Windows will still work; one just uses Task Manager to relaunch the shell.)
