Media Art Issues - 4.5.1

[daddyd]

On the master server (which on the IV doesnt display the art either) is 2.78GB, on the office thin client the dir is 608MB.

[Dean Roddey]

Are you kidding? That doesn't seem remotely possible. Are you actually talking about the contents of the whole directory? I'm just looking for the size of the specific file I mentioned. I don't think you could make it 2.78GB if you wanted to.

[Dean Roddey]

Are you using the auto-generated user interfaces or some of your own?

[daddyd]

I'm not kidding (and don't call me Shirley...), the directory file size of my master server c:\CQC\CQCData\Client\Data\MediaCache is 2.78GB. Within that is the 2 subdirectories Jriver (2.42GB), and MyMovies (365MB).

[Dean Roddey]

Oh, OK, I'm just looking for the size of a specific file within each of those directories. It's called Metadata.CQCRepoDB. That's the one the size of which may be getting too large for the local client media cache to load, which would cause your IV not to be able to display info even if it's been downloaded.

[Dean Roddey]

I updated the Upgrade Guide technical document to include warnings slash discussion of the issue of embedded clients that might not have enough storage for the media cache.

Anyone using them will either way to wait to upgrade, or maybe just stop the client service on those machines and set them to disabled so they won't start back up. That will mean no media on those machines for now though.

[Dean Roddey]

OK, I thought 8MB would be overkill for the metadata, but yours is 13.x MB, so I need to up my limit considerably. I will do that, and I've added more logging, and will add some more checks and logging as well, and get a new drop up for you to try here in a bit.

The embedded clients are a loss for media in the short term probably, unless they have almost enough memory and are just a little over. In that case, you could make it work. Some of your artwork is probably bigger than is really required. So you could reduce it and that would reduce the storage requirements as well.

Otherwise, in the sort term, you can just disable the CQC Client Service on two embedded machines. YOu won't have any media access, but at least the client service won't continue to try to download the data and fail and try it again, due to lack of memory.

[Dean Roddey]

I'm not going to get a new drop out tonight. I need to also do more testing on the changes I made to the OLE embedding stuff (for the web browser widget.) I can't push any releases out now without a lot of testing, because they become real releases, not betas. So I have to get back into that other frame of mind.

I'll do more testing in the morning, and get a drop up some time after lunch probably.

The client service/media cache changes look fine. The extra logging will be quite useful, and there shouldn't be any issues with metadata size. It also should use less memory now as well.

One thing you may consider is to run our little CQCRescaleImgs program on your image directory in the ProgramData\MyMovies\.... cover art directory. You can copy it away just in case you want to go back, but you can often reduce the size considerably without any real loss of quality. That will make the downloads faster and reduce memory usage. Its quite simple. Just open the CQC COmmand Prompt and run it without any parameters and it will give you instructions. Browse through some of the large art in your MM covers and see what size they are, that will let you know what a possible new size to try would be.

If you decide to try again, copy back in the originals, and run it again on them, else you will get undue image degradation.

BTW, now that you have upgraded, even if you were using existing templates you would have had to create a layout template for the CAB, if you didn't juts use the default one. If you created one, did you tell it to use small cover art? That will make things far faster and more efficient.

[Dean Roddey]

Another option on the embedded machines, if you really want media access, would be to stop the client service and just run the Windows RIVA client there. You'll lose the fancy scrolling, but you'll get the media access back. And on a wired machine, it'll be quite stable and quick.

[Dean Roddey]

Give the 4.5.2 version a try and let's see how it does. I'm not going to post it officially yet, since we may make more changes based on what we see in the logging from this guy.

http://www.charmedquark.com/Web2/Downloa..._4_5_2.Zip

As I mentioned before, make sure that your CAB layout is set up to use small art. That will make a big difference in memory usage and performance. Large art only needs to be used in the preview popups, so few of those end up getting brought into memory on the clients.