Problem:
Lighroom stops producing thumbnails on videos when preparing to import, and will not import videos. It will produce an error output log shown below. Lightroom will not exit all the way when trying to close after a failed import. Using sysinternals process explorer, you can see that "dynamiclinkmediaserver.exe" is hung. I suggest using process explorer because you can see the process tree / process dependencies. You must manually kill the "Lightroom.exe/dynamiclinkmanager.exe/dynamiclinkmediaserver.exe" process tree, in process explorer, to completely exit the program and try again. This issue also existed for Adobe Bridge, which also uses the "dynamiclinkmediaserver.exe"
This was for a large library import of over 67,000 photos and videos combined.
Error output example shortened:
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An unknown error has occurred while reading the video file. Connecting to Dynamic Link server failed. (754)
P:\a6300\Cape Cod 2021\Cape Cod 2021 Video\C0017.MP4
P:\a6300\Cape Cod 2021\Cape Cod 2021 Video\C0005.MP4
P:\a6300\Cape Cod 2021\Cape Cod 2021 Video\C0011.MP4
P:\a6300\Cape Cod 2021\Cape Cod 2021 Video\C0004.MP4
P:\a6300\Cape Cod 2021\Cape Cod 2021 Video\C0018.MP4
P:\a6300\Cape Cod 2021\Cape Cod 2021 Video\C0015.MP4
P:\a6300\Cape Cod 2021\Cape Cod 2021 Video\C0016.MP4
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I had an open case about this issue and the tech was not able get to the root cause. He had me on a wild goose chase blaming it on my drives, which was not the case at all. Either he abandoned the session or we got disconnected somehow but I ended up figuring out the issue on my own.
Solution:
I identified 4 or 5 corrupt video files within my library. These were videos taken during a low phone battery where the phone died during a recording. I identified them by using windows explorer and removed the videos that would not produce a thumbnail in icon view. This was a manual process going through many subfolders and took a while. After removing the offending files, lightroom no longer hung, nor produced any more errors.
The errors by the way had nothing to do with the offending files. It seems once the "dynamiclinkmediaserver.exe" encountered a bad video file, it would produce errors for any non-corrupt video file moving forward. Offending video files were randomly in a long list of many non-offending files. The error log was usless and misleading.
Recommendation:
Adobe software engineers need to fix this so if a corrupt video file is encountered, it will be ignored and an error log will show the offending file. Currently the "dynamiclinkmediaserver.exe" chokes and then produces errors for good video files. You have no way of knowing which video files caused the issue with the current logging in place.
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