Participating Frequently

P: Video Cache is out of control

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
October 19, 2015
148 replies
3274 views

I recently upgraded to Lightroom 6.2.1 So far there has been a lot of fuss over the import dialog... ok, well sure, it has a few issues, but they can be either worked around or just revert back to 6.1.1

I would like to report and ACTUAL bug in 6.2.1

My D drive recently ran out of space... I tried deleting some stuff I didn't need, but still it kept running out of space... So I finally ran windirstat and had a look at it.. Nearly HALF of my drive was FULL of D:/temp/Adobe Local/Lightroom/caches/video/media Cache Files. Now here's the kicker... NONE of these video files are even on the hard drive that has my catalog on it. My lightroom database is on drive L:\ all my lightroom photos and very few lightroom videos are all on L:\ I have a few scans on drive K:\ that I import to lightroom... but these videos are ALL on Drives E:\ and F:\

here's another thing.. I knew Adobe wasted space caching videos, and I do have a GOPRO and I record a little video,.. .VERY LITTLE, maybe 1 video a year... so I don't really want ANY of the video cached.. I will wait for it to load... SO a long time ago, I set my video cache in Preferences>File Handling to the minimum of 1GB (It's was always a BUG to not allow 0GB) I don't want to cache any videos!!!!!!!!!! but here it is.. NEW BUG It's STILL SET TO 1GB!!!!!!!!!!! How is it gobbling up almost 1TB of space when I have it set to 1GB??????????????? So.... here's another problem... I have Cache files that are 4GB for a movie that only takes up 2GB on my hard drive.. what's up with THAT??????????????? I randomly checked a few, and the worst one was a 5GB cache file for a movie that only takes up 750MB on my hard drive... two things, first of all... you NEVER EVER EVER need to cache an entire movie... caching more than 1 minute of a video is useless... if you're going to watch the video in lightroom, it can just play the video on the hard drive fast enough that it doesn't need further caching.. second... DON'T CACHE THE VIDEO AT ALL!!!! just capture the thumbnail of it so you don't have a blank square on the catalog and call it a day... if someone wants to play the video, it will load and play plenty fast enough, Lightroom Can't work with video files, only play them, so WHY BOTHER TO CACHE THE WHOLE THING?? come on Adobe, some COMMON SENSE please!!!!

so now ANOTHER BUG, it's already set to limit video cache to 1GB, so I figure, the new import thing must have built this RIDICULOUS Cache, so I will just Purge it, that will bring it down to 1GB right??/ WRONG!!! It pops up a message saying "Video cache is being purged, this message will be dismissed when the purge is finished... I wait 5 Seconds, and the message disappears, I have NO hard drive activity, and well... I STILL have 1GB of Video Cache files!!!!!!!!!!! Ok, maybe it didn't take.. let me set it to 2GB, then purge.. NOPE! let me set it back to 1GB then purge, NOPE..

ok, so I suspect how to fix it will be, (I Hope) click import, and select the movies folder and then select Ignore source... by the way, how do I add my E:\scans folder as a legitimate source.. I just removed a source, how do I add a nice shortcut button for a new one? ok, now that source is removed, I hope it won't scan it again... now that it will HOPEFULLY not scan that hard drive again, I'll manually delete the offending Video cache.. ok manual delete complete, Ahh my drive can breathe again.. Lets open light room and see what happens.... ok.. open.. lets open the Import dialog because eventually I'll need to import something... oh-o..... What's this??? Scanning Common Locations... OH-NO!!!!!!!!!! first of all E:\Moves and F:\TV are NOT COMMON LOCATIONS FOR PHOTOS Second, I REMOVED THOSE LOCATIONS.. It has a valid location listed, WHY IS IS LOOKING FOR SOMEWHERE ELSE????? Yes it's now scanning VIDEOS and the only reason for it to be taking so long is it went back to my E and F drive... lets look at the cache folder... oh yes, MediaCache already has 3,876 files in it.... not looking very good. Why is it caching files that are not even imported into lightroom??? and why is the cache for each file taking up more space than the entire video??? If you want to make a video cache.. just cache the THUMBNAIL ONLY!!!!! we don't need or want anything else cached.. a thumbnail is all we need cached for our few relevant videos so we don't have a black square in our catalog.

Crap, I'm going to be FORCED to revert to 6.1.1 even though I had every intention of working around the other 6.2.1 issues. TEST TEST TEST Test your software!!! the monkeys you have testing it are not doing a good enough job! send it to me, I'll test it for you, It needs to be tested on a real computer, one that is used for other things.. that way you would KNOW it's finding stupid things like CD cover art and every movie and tv show on my hard drive. I seem to find glaringly obvious issues within one day of using the product. I've been developing software for the last 28 years, I know how it should be done, and how things should be tested, and this is NOT being done AT ALL. Your programmers are sub-standard and are missing the mark, and your non-existent SQA department is NOT testing even the simplest of functions.

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S

simonsaith

Adobe Employee

Can you confirm again that the bug does not exists in Lr 6.1.1?

jamesr33423836Author

Participating Frequently

That is awesome! I look forward to it. Now that I understand better what causes this, I will be able to avoid any problems until then.

Thank you very much for your attention to this

James

J

J453

Legend

Hi James. This issue should be fixed in our next update.

jamesr33423836Author

Participating Frequently

I agree, that is the purpose of Caching, however, this has gone wrong, first of all, Caching is only of benefit if the file will be accessed more than once, if the file is only accessed exactly once, then the time it takes to open the file and build a cache file is slower than just opening the file, since I was just looking at an import folder to see what was in it, and i did not import anything, there is no reason to assume that any file would need to be accessed a second time. furthermore, for the purpose of importing a video, all I need and in fact all I CAN use to make my decision is the thumbnail image, which does not need to be cached. I can't play the videos from the import dialog if wanted to. also Cache files that are 3-4 times larger than the original cannot ever be faster than the smaller original... and lastly If I rarely ever play any videos in lightroom, then caching is useless and a waste of time and resources, because while it's busy caching a video I will not look at again, it could have been just playing the video. Since lightroom can't edit videos, caching them is useless. on top of that, my system is fast enough that I don't ever need to cache any videos... If I just play any of the movies that lightroom cached from the original files with VLC media player, they load and start playing as close to instantly as I can determine, Even a 3 hour movie plays instantly... so i NEVER want to cache any videos ever. It makes no sense at all. PLEASE Let me disable it!

jamesr33423836Author

Participating Frequently

Certainly!! here is the paste from system info:

Lightroom version: 6.0 [1014445]
License: Perpetual
Operating system: Windows 7 Business Edition
Version: 6.1 [7601]
Application architecture: x64
System architecture: x64
Logical processor count: 8
Processor speed: 4.7 GHz
Built-in memory: 32665.1 MB
Real memory available to Lightroom: 32665.1 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 450.1 MB (1.3%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 431.2 MB
Memory cache size: 157.9 MB
Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 8
Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX
System DPI setting: 96 DPI
Desktop composition enabled: Yes
Displays: 1) 1920x1200, 2) 1920x1080, 3) 1200x1920, 4) 1920x1200
Input types: Multitouch: No, Integrated touch: No, Integrated pen: No, External touch: No, External pen: No, Keyboard: No

Graphics Processor Info:
GeForce GTX 760/PCIe/SSE2

Check OpenGL support: Passed
Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Version: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 353.62
Renderer: GeForce GTX 760/PCIe/SSE2
LanguageVersion: 3.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler

Application folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Lightroom
Library Path: L:\Lightroom Data\Photos\Photos.lrcat
Settings Folder: C:\Users\James\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom

Installed Plugins:
1) Behance
2) Canon Tether Plugin
3) Facebook
4) Flickr
5) Leica Tether Plugin
6) Nikon Tether Plugin

Config.lua flags: None

Adapter #1: Vendor : 10de
Device : 1187
Subsystem : 847a1043
Revision : a1
Video Memory : 1990
AudioDeviceIOBlockSize: 1024
AudioDeviceName: CP9287-4 (NVIDIA High Definition Audio)
AudioDeviceNumberOfChannels: 2
AudioDeviceSampleRate: 44100
Build: Uninitialized
Direct2DEnabled: false
GPUDevice: not available
OGLEnabled: true

S

simonsaith

Adobe Employee

To help our QE reproduce the issue, could you copy and paste your system info from Lightroom's system info dialog? It seems wrong that the dynamiclinkedmediaserver.exe is ignoring the cache size limit set by the Lightroom. The dynamiclinkedmediaserver.exe process is a shared server process with some of Adobe's other product (PS, video etc). I might be wrong on this. Caching is typically a technique to tradeoff faster runtime performance with a larger storage.

jamesr33423836Author

Participating Frequently

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

If I didn't terminate it, It could continue to cache files until my drive was full... i can't imagine that this is expected behavior.

also lightroom should close it's child processes upon exit. To leave anything running and not clean up after itself is bad programming. I suspect dynamiclinkedmediaserver.exe was launched in error, and therefore not shut down, because it was not supposed to be running. Caching anything from just looking at an import screen without ever actually importing anything makes no sense, so I would conclude it was an accident.

It's also doing it WRONG, no debate about it, Creating a cache file that is 3-4 times the size of the original file is just a waste, if the cached file is that much larger than the original, it will load slower than the original, thus defeating the purpose of a cache. I've had 1.8GB cache files of original files that were only 500MB this also indicates that it could be run inadvertently, and possibly missing some command line parameters which would prevent this strange behavior. The real video cache files for real videos that are intended to be cached are not this way, The cache files are much much smaller than the originals.

jamesr33423836Author

Participating Frequently

I sure would be grateful if I could help Adobe further by being an official beta tester. I am finding bugs and their cause, you need beta testers like me who run Lighroom on a real system, not a stripped down development system that has nothing on it but your compilers and 100 photos just to see how it works.

S

simonsaith

Adobe Employee

Thanks for the info. The dynamiclinkedmediaserver.exe is a child process that Lr spawns to handle all the video decoding and encoding. I've forwarded the info to one of our engineers to investigate to see if this is an expected behavior or not.

jamesr33423836Author

Participating Frequently

it is set at 1GB

When I re-installed 6.0, it went back to 3GB, I changed it to 1 GB

I wish i could set it to 0. I don't need or want video cache... only to display thumbnails

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