I am a registered v8 user. Can anyone confirm that the invalid avi file bug has been explicity addressed in the new version? There is no mention in the release notes.
Specifically if you have a folder containing an "invalid" avi file e.g. one that is only partially downloaded or in progress or otherwise corrupt then DOpus CPU usage goes to 100% and cannot be recovered without terminating and restarting the app.
The problem may be caused by a video codec rather than Opus itself. Opus just asks the codecs you have installed to scan the files and if the codecs go crazy with a particular file there's not much Opus can do apart from kill the thread (which is dangerous).
Which codecs do you have installed? I generally only install FFDShow which, these days, seems quite stable and decodes just about everything by itself.
Like Nudel said FFDShow is very good, but I don't know if it plays all formats you need.
I'm using "K-Lite Mega Codec Pack" (which includes FFDShow) with XP/Vista and DO8/DO9 for a long time now and never had any problems (happily, had lots of trouble before and was frightened when changing to Vista 
!).
You won't see problems unless you have a 'problematic' avi. Normal avi files work fine. Try downloading an avi and abort the download part way through.
How come other file managers e.g. Total Commander, Explorer, xplorer2 don't exhibit the same problem?
I have to kill DOpus and then delete or move the file with Total Commander to get out of this situation.
By the way I have divx, xvid, quicktime alternative, real alternative plus WinDVD codecs.
I guess this is, because DOpus reads into the file to show a preview of the movie in thumbnail mode. TC, XPlorer2 and Windows Explorer (except Vista Explorer) only gather file information but don't try to decode.
So can I turn this feature off? I rarely use thumbnails and never for video files.
Could you find a small example file that causes the problem and upload it (in a zip as the original extension won't be allowed by the forum) so we can try to reproduce it and/or confirm it doesn't go wrong with the codecs we have installed?
Disabling the Movie plugin (or configuring the plugin and turning off thumbnails, if the problem only happens when a thumbnail is generated) should make the problem go away.
Sorry for the delay.
No I don't have a small example file. It usually occurs on a download where the space for the whole file has been allocated but the download has not completed.
This definitely occurs without thumbnails switched on - I very rarely use thumbnail mode and I never have it on if I'm viewing or moving avi's.
So does it try to intepret the file even if I'm not in thumbnail mode?
When you say disable the movie plugin - how do I do this and will I lose anything else?
Yeah, it probably will. For example, if the Description column is on then Opus will try to inspect AVI files, via the video codecs you have installed, to find out the video's dimensions and other information.
Go to Preferences - Plugins - Viewers and turn off the Movie plugin. You will lose the ability to play movies in the Opus viewer pane, movie thumbnails (though Explorer may still generate the thumbnails for you, if "shell image extraction" is enabled in Opus), and the extra information for movie files that is sometimes displayed in the Description, Width, Height, Codec, etc. columns. (See the screenshot for what I mean.)
If you don't care about any of that then turning the movie plugin off is quicker and easier than working out which codec on your system is going haywire with incomplete files.
Let us know how you get on.
I'll try the suggestions.
How does this process work? Do you just point all codecs at the file based on the extension and hope that one of them can interpret it successfully?
Presumably it must be something like that if you are not able to identify the codec at fault?
The other thing is that these locks do not occur in Windows Explorer yet it is able to provide the same info (bitrate, dimensions etc) via a tooltip. Therefore there must be a way to defensively program this so you avoid the issue.
Yup, that's how codecs work (in general, anyway).
You can usually track down the codec that's causing problems by trial and error. Obviously I can't track down which codec on your computer is causing you problems, though. If it was on my computer I'd start uninstalling codecs until I worked out which it was, but that can be quite a time consuming process, so if you don't care about the movie plugin you could just disable it. It'd be nice to know which codec is causing the problem to help other people, though, as well as to give GPSoft a chance to reproduce the problem and perhaps add a workaround that prevents it from happening.
Possibly, but it could also be a bug that doesn't happen when the codec is used in the exact same way that Explorer does (which isn't documented so it's difficult to know what that is exactly) but does happen when Opus (or some other program) uses it slightly differently. Keep in mind that every codec author is going to test his code against Explorer but probably hasn't tested that it works okay in Opus.
