Improve the preview generation for videos

[chrlschn]

Hi there,

I'm using XnView MP on an Apple MacBook Pro M1 with 16 GB of RAM.

In general, I think this tool is the closest to ideal for my workflows and includes 1) tree view, 2) previews and thumbs, 3) large preview on select.

The only problem I'm running into is that I have been unable to generate thumbs for a large set of videos. The application freezes, even though it shows no memory or CPU pressure in Activity Monitor, requiring a forced exit.

The folder in question has been copied to a 2 TB external SSD (I thought maybe it was an issue with throughput to the SD card). The SD card had 250 GB of media (mostly video, but some photos).

It will generate thumbs for some directories without issue, but not others. In all cases, these are .mp4 files and I'm not seeing a specific pattern as to what is causing it to fail. I have even gone as far as manually partitioning the files into smaller folders so there are less files to process at once.

I tried a few other apps and they are able to quickly generate the previews for large sets of .mp4 files. However, apps like Commander One simply do not have the same functionality that XnView has with respect to managing media.

I'm wondering if there is a workaround to make this work or otherwise, address this issue with generation of previews. But it seems like re-writing this logic might be necessary as I'm curious why apps like CommanderOne are able to generate the preview so quickly without issue.