I know that the current version of dopus is not fully compatible with Vista, but I am experiencing what appears to me to be weird behavior and I would like to get thoughts from others ans to what might be going on.
I am running Vista Ultimate and dopus v8.2.2.5.U. For the most part dopus is functioning normally. However, I have a number of folders on the local machine as well as networked computers that contain movie videos stored in a .mpg format. Whenever I try to perform an operation (rename, delete, move, copy, etc) on one of these .mpg files I get an error message saying the file is being used by another process (see attacment below), even though there are no other processes using any of these files.
In order to try and determine what was going on I downloaded and installed a program named Process Explorer from a Microsoft site (www.sysinternals.com) that shows all of the processes running on the machine and all of the file handles that each process owns. Process Explorer showed that whenever a dopus lister opened a folder with .mpg files those file handles would show up as owned by dopus even though the files were not selected or being operated on (see attachment ). Furthermore, those file handles remain owned by dopus after the lister is closed and stay owned by dopus until the program is completely terminated. Also, even though dopus was showed as the owner of the file handles, dopus itself was not able to perform any operations on the files.
This issue only manifests itself on files with a .mpg extension. Other files in the same folders with other extensions do not become owned by dopus. Also, the same behavior exists on local as well as networked folders.
I am sure there is some rational explanation for this strange behavior, but I certainly can't explain it. Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
If you have columns turned on like Description or Dimensions then Opus will open movie files to attempt to read the information. Depending on the file and the codec this can take anything from a split second to several seconds for each file. If you have a multi-CPU machine then Opus may open more than one file at once, but it shouldn't ever keep more files open than the number of CPUs you have (+1 perhaps).
If the files remain locked several minutes after opening the directory, or every file in the directory is locked, then something is definitely going wrong.
The problem may be caused by a video codec going wrong. Opus relies on the codecs in your system to decipher movie files and if they go wrong it will look like dopus.exe is the problem when it's really the codec that dopus.exe has loaded to do the work.
I am also using Vista and I don't see the problem you are seeing with mpeg files. The only codecs I have installed beyond what comes with Vista are FFDShow, Quicktime and TSCC (Techsmith Camtasia). (I've also installed an FLV splitter and an MPEG4 splitter to enable FLV and most MOV files to play in Media Player etc., but I don't think the problem will be caused by what you haven't installed, rather it's probably something you have installed.)
One possibility for tracking down the problem is to exit Opus, then start it up (making sure there are no video files at all in the directory you show after startup), then run Process Monitor and then point Opus at a directory with MPEG files. See which codec DLLs Opus ends up loading.
You are right that the .mpg files do not get locked if I turn off the description column. However, I checked the dll's that are attached to dopus and there was no change in the list when I either turned on or off the description column, but when the description column gets turned on the files definitely get locked and stay locked until dopus is terminated. See the attached screen captures for the complete list of dll's that are loaded.
Try disabling all of your Opus viewer plugins (Preferences -> Plugins), then restart Opus and see if the lock still happens when the Description column is on.
Assuming it doesn't, enable just the Movie plugin and repeat.
If it seems to be the movie plugin locking the files, let us know. If not, enable a few plugins at a time to try to work out which one it is that's creating the lock.
That is odd... All I can say is it doesn't happen for me with Vista and the beta version of Opus that I'm testing with. If you can live with the problem for now it might be worth waiting until the official Vista supported version is released to see if it solves the problem. I'm not aware of any fix in this area, though.
Good news! I've just experienced something similar, except with a different type of file.
I noticed it only happened to files which were over 4gig and from there Jon tracked it down to what appears to be a bug in Vista. If you call a certain Windows API function to get information on a file and the file is larger than 4gig then the file remains locked afterwards, unlike with previous versions of Windows.
You can expect a workaround to this problem in the Vista-ready version of Opus. Thanks for bringing it up as it made it easier for us to track down what was wrong.
We've made a minor update to the release version which will hopefully fix this issue - if you want to download it from www.gpsoft.com.au and try it out. Please let us know how you get on!
