dopus has been quite sluggish and I think I've narrowed it down to the viewer pane, which is trying to load a large mp4 file never gets past - it is marked as (loading) and never displays anything or allows me to abort it with x or the viewer pane icon. I think it's pretty clear that viewer plane is attempting something that it is never going to finish or allow me to stop it.
I have viewer plugins set to minimal i.e. animated gif, jpeg 2000, text so I'm not requiring dopus viewer pane to do anything with any movie files except ignore
had a look through preferences and couldn't see anything else
I like the viewer pane for the things I want to see like text and pictures, but I don't want it to process anything else.
In the meantime I have to reluctantly turn viewer pane off.
even when I close down the lister and close down dopus in notification area, dopus.exe keeps plugging away at 80% cpu and dopusrt.exe is there too, until I abort them with task manager.
For video files, you're at the mercy of the video codecs and splitters installed on your system.
You shouldn't normally need additional components for MP4 files but that doesn't stop some codec packs from installing them, so if you are using any installed codecs or codec packs it's worth making sure they are up to date.
Also note that Opus normally (depending on the plugin used) uses 64-bit components, unlike most video players, so there may be two sets of codecs to update as well as different results in 32-bit apps that you'd expect to use the same codecs.
You can also disable the Opus Movie plugin and let the ActiveX plugin handle video files, either through the Windows Media Player preview handler (which will be like in Explorer) or the WMP ActiveX control (similar, but with auto-play). As a bonus, playback will be isolated in a separate process and can be done using 32-bit codecs in that case.
Thanks - this is pretty much out of my comfort zone but I do want to understand so that I can get my nice viewer pane back, so my questions may not even make sense...
I play movie files like mp4 outside dopus with media player classic home cinema. I don't use WMP at all.
Is there a way for me to take a view of video codecs and splitters installed on my system - some kind of utility for those of us not blessed with huge experience in these matters for example.
In control panel programs I can't see any installed codecs.
I'm on windows 7 home premium 32bit so Im not sure how 64 bit components would run...
Opus movie plugin - is that one of the plugins like text etc - I don't have that ticked (see my first post) - is that the same thing?
I also don't have activex ticked in plugins.
In short, the only way I want movies to play or be previewed or anything at all is if I choose to play them in media player classic home cinema. If there's some configuration to do in WMP or activex can you give me a bit more detail on what I'd need to do?
And if this is a feature request, can I request that there's some way for me to tick a super duper box in dopus and shazam!
Confirmed - neither the Movie nor the ActiveX + Preview + Office + Web plugins are enabled.
Confirmed - no 3rd party plugins installed.
I don't think the viewer pane is trying to play the video - it is trying to create a picture from the video. I just tried selecting a small mp4 with the viewer pane selected, and the viewer pane shows a picture from the start of the video. Is this a function of the jpeg 2000 plugin that I do have switched on?
Same scenario - single click on large mp4 with viewer pane open - viewer pane shows nothing but its header has (loading) - wait for 2 mins and still in this state - high cpu - try to delete file and get message:
The action can't be completed because the file is open in directory opus
so it's definitely trying to read the file to get a picture snapshot from it, despite my every effort to ask dopus to not try to do anything with the file re the viewer pane.
Only way out of this now is to go into task manager which shows high cpu for dopus.exe and abort the dopus.exe and dopusrt.exe processes...
OK that looks to be better for mp4 files (and other movie formats) that I selected. Now I just see a passive mp4 or whatever type icon that looks like the icon associated with the file type program (media player classic home cinema). Looked up the setting in the help but no luck for me there, so what does this mean to the uninitiated?
It's documented in the F1 help for that Preferences page. The setting will make the viewer display a thumbnail (generated via the shell; Explorer, essentially) if nothing better can view the image. Explorer does the same thing in its viewer pane, and for some image formats it's the best/only way to display a preview.
That tells us Explorer is unable to generate thumbnails for the files, at least. I wonder if it has a stuck thumbnail generator in the background as well. I suspect it does, and there's an issue with your video codecs/splitters (since MP4 files should get thumbnails in Explorer, if they were working; in fact, you should get a movie viewer in Explorer's viewer pane, and thumbnails in its file display).
There's already enough to suggest you probably do. How to fix it is the difficult part, as it depends on which codecs have been installed on your system.
I would ignore the Opus side of the problem entirely to begin with and focus on getting thumbnails to work in Explorer. Once that is solved, the problem in Opus should be as well.
which I ran. I'm crawling up the learning curve, but there seem to be two kinds of setup for codecs to run in:
media player classic home cinema and similar programs have their codecs built in
WMP and I'm guessing explorer and others have an externalised setup with a sea of codecs and config stuff.
This microsoft tool found problems with AVI Splitter codec and Mpeg Splitter codec and disabled them, with the advice that if anything now stops working to re-install. I have no idea what a splitter is and google isn't much help, or what uses these two, and I don't know if they will stop dopus from hanging in the viewer pane, but it seems to be a start.
I'll be monitoring.
What is staggering is the 5 page report the fixit produces with those codecs and splitters it checked.
I have no way of knowing if this stuff is ever used, but it makes me wonder if anyone is NOT having some issues bubbling beneath the surface.
The nirsoft program installedcodec shows 92 entries and nothing highlighted, so looking promising...
Maybe every dopus user should do a little check from time to time. Perhaps some do - it would be useful to know the best way to keep tabs on this minefield.