BabelSoft / 博语软件

This a great program, thanks for your effort, it's much appreciated.

I'd like to request a feature:

One thing I liked in Windows XP's Explorer was that it placed the Thumbs.db file in each respective folder instead of a centralised cache. Is it possible to provide this as an option?

This was useful when writing image files to CD/DVD. I would first have Windows Explorer generate the thumbnails on a local HDD by opening that folder. Then I would write the Thumbs.db file to the CD/DVD along with its respective images. When viewing that folder of images from the CD/DVD drive the thumbnails would display almost instantly, as Explorer only had to read the already-created Thumbs.db file instead of having to generate it. I think Microsoft screwed up by not at least providing the old method as an option.

This might also be useful in avoiding the thumbs cache from being wiped every time I restart Windows (ver. 7 64bit). However, I read a post from you on this forum about Windows not providing the full file path, which might make this feature difficult to implement?

Also, I notice that with Windows 7 there seems to be a bug where thumbnail generation on network drives (my NASes) stalls after some time, but continues on local drives. Windows needs to be rebooted for thumbnail generation on my NASes to continue. A lot of people on the Microsoft discussion forums, and elsewhere, have been complaining about this ever since Windows 7 was released, but Microsoft doesn't seem willing or able to fix this. Do you know why this happens? Is there any way this can be fixed, as it still happens with Media Preview?

Anyway, thanks again for the program.

Sadly, Media Preview can't bring back the local cache functionality to Win7. The shell in Win7 doesn't open up any possibilities for this kind of feature as everything has indeed been changed for centralized cache.

However, the next version of Media Preview should provide a solution about the issue of the system cache being wiped out regularly.

I don't have a NAS myself as I prefer to use old-fashioned local drives. So I actually wasn't aware of this Windows bug. But I don't think I'll be able to come up with a patch for this particular issue. Let me explain why by describing how the shell and Media Preview work together:
1- users crawls the file structure through Windows Explorer or any other Explorer compliant browsers
2- the shell looks for available thumbnails in system cache
3.a- if thumbnails are available, the shell sends them over to the browser
3.b- if no available thumbnails, the shell calls for Media Preview to provide them
4.b- the shell sends provided thumbnails to the browser and then caches them into the system cache

As you can see, the actual decision of whether a new thumbnail should be generated or not is made by the shell, not by Media Preview. So Media Preview cannot really do anything about this bug.
As to why it happens, it's probably because data transfer between the shell and NASes are rather slow, and so the shell must have a set limit, below which it won't consume any bandwidth for thumbnail generation but simply reserve the whole bandwidth for actual user consumption. So the shell tests the available bandwidth for a while and then decide if it can go or not with thumbnail generation.

The only solution I can come up right now is to develop my own shell replacement... it's actually something I'm regularly thinking to do, but then I just give up seeing at how slow I'm at developing Media Preview new features...

I didn't think it would be so easy.

Thanks for the reply.