Stop movie thumbnail generation

Thumbnail generation of video files has caused me too many problems. I don't even care whether the fault lies with the codecs, DOpus, or the phase of the moon. I just want it to stop.

How do I get DOpus to stop trying to generate thumbnails from video files? I tried turning off the thumbnail generation in the movie plugin, but that didn't even slow it down. Then I disabled the whole movie plugin. That appeared to have some effect, but I still see DOpus trying to generate thumbnails for some video files. How do I make it stop?

You will probably also have to turn off the Shell Image Extraction option in Preferences - Display Modes - Thumbnails, since if the Movie plugin doesn't generate the thumbnails then the Shell will often still try to do so (in a slightly different way).

Also remember that thumbnail caching may mean that some movie files still have thumbnails even though they will no longer be generated. Temporarily turn off or clear the thumbnail cache to avoid the confusion that that can cause while ensuring nothing is generating the thumbnails anymore.

BTW, these days I only install the FFDShow codec and some filter DLLs (basically the ones described in the movie playback FAQ) and I have not seen a problem generating movie thumbnails for a very long time. It can be hard to find and get rid of existing codecs, though, of course.

Forgot to mention I also had turned off the Shell Image Extraction.

The reason I'm pretty sure it's still actively generating some thumbnails is while I was composing the original message Opus was sitting off to the side, opened on a folder than contained several video files. As I was typing my message I watched as a couple thumbnails replaced the generic icon. Thumbnails coming from the cache appear almost instantly and these showed up a minute or more after I'd pulled up that folder. And that's the whole reason for wanting to turn them off. Hangups and very long periods of extensive CPU usage.

I started using FFDShow after reading about it here, but I can't say I've been thrilled. Since installing it I've had any number of problems with videos that used to work perfectly. I've also noticed a lot of videos that have off color portions. I tried getting Media Player to use the real Xvid and DivX codecs, but I think it's still using FFDShow in some cases. I should probably uninstall it and start over.

There's also the Animate AVI thumbnails option, you may need to turn this off as well.

I just noticed something. For a split second one of the .avi files changed to the generic icon and then changed back to the black frame thumbnail that was displayed before. It just did it again. It's possible this is what I noticed previously and assumed it was still generating video thumbnails. (I don't believe that to be the case, but it's possible.)

Anyway, now this raises the question of why the thumbnail is repeatedly changing back to the generic icon and then back to the black frame thumbnail. Any ideas? Opus is just sitting there behind my browser with part of a lister visible. It shouldn't be doing anything.

Did you clear the thumbnail cache? Opus may have simply cached black thumbnails for those files.

There are options in the movie plugin that make it search for a non-black frame.

Opus will show the generic icon for the files first and then replace it with the thumbnail from the cache, if there is one, and if not generate a new thumbnail. It won't at any point display a "temporary" thumbnail, so if the icon changes to something else then that's the thumbnail and Opus isn't generating anything for that file in the background anymore.

I didn't clear the cache because I already have a couple hours of CPU time spent building the cache that's there. I'm willing to accept that it's simply displaying what was already cached. Now I'm wondering why it keeps re-displaying the thumbnail over and over.

If another process is updating a file in the folder, would that result in Opus re-displaying all the thumbnails? I believe I had a BitTorrent download directed to that folder so some other file in the folder may have been being updated independently of Opus. The only thing I can figure is the download file changes, which causes some property of the folder to change, which causes Opus to re-display the contents of the folder.

If the file changes then, yes, Opus will attempt to update the thumbnail for that file.

If another in the same directory changes then Opus will update the changed file's thumbnail, but it won't update the thumbnails for the unchanged files, of course.

What if data for the containing folder changes? I'm speculating here, but if another file in the folder is updated by a different process, might that not also change the last updated time for the folder and cause re-display of the entire folder contents?

Nope.

As far as I can tell I have everything that controls generation of video thumbnails turned off, yet I'm still getting thumbnails for brand new video files. Most of them are coming up as totally black frames, but a few show a non-black frame from the video.