Subject: Re: [Usher Talk] Usher .13's "crawler" continuously crawles

From: Rob Griffiths <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2016 14:16:35 -0800

On Feb 16, 2016, at 2:11 PM, Some User <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Thank you for the fast work, impressive...
> 
> By the way, I love the way the design seems to go, and I did notice that the crawler was faster, but I wasn't sure of me, you know, network drives and video plugins...
> 
> Thanks again, bravo (en francais dans l'texte !)...

Glad to hear it's all working properly again; we're waiting on one other tester for feedback, and assuming that's positive, we'll get this change rolled out into a release version ASAP.

regards;
-rob.

---

From: Some User <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2016 14:11:46 -0800 (PST)

By the way, I love the way the design seems to go, and I did notice that 
the crawler was faster, but I wasn't sure of me, you know, network drives 
and video plugins...

---

From: Rob Griffiths <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2016 06:39:27 -0800

On Feb 12, 2016, at 9:37 AM, Some User <[email-masked]> wrote:

> is crappy, Usher fails and doesn't displays the preview picture. Setting a value above zero in the property list gets Usher happy again...

Thanks for the excellent detective work - Peter's working on a fix, and we'll send a beta out shortly. (Usher changed its preview engine with this release, and it generally works much better than the old one, but we missed some use cases, obviously.)

regards,
-rob.

---

From: Some User <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2016 09:37:00 -0800 (PST)

I did some more digging, I think I got it...
If the movie has a duration of zero in the library's property list, Usher 
tries to set that duration, if the file is crappy, Usher fails and doesn't 
displays the preview picture. Setting a value above zero in the property 
list gets Usher happy again...

But maybe you figured it on your side...

Thanks...

---

From: Some User <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2016 08:51:31 -0800 (PST)

So I did some "research"...
When using Usher 1.1.12 and 1.1.11, Usher correctly displays the previews 
that were set say, "back in the days", so preview files indeed are present 
in the Previews folder of the Usher library, but just doesn't get displayed 
in .13.
I guess that any time Usher .13 gets to a malformed file, it feels it has 
to check it, even if the file had previously been "accepted" in the 
library, and this is a new behavior...

Anyway, thanks for the great work and sorry for the flooding...

---

From: Some User <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2016 08:25:31 -0800 (PST)

Yes I'm aware of the creepy setup !
Nonetheless Usher is one of my favorites, and I got used to those bad 
files, network use or so, I will try to use .12 and see if it gets previews 
right, and check the preview files in the Usher library...
Thank you for your answer...

Regards.

---

From: Rob Griffiths <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2016 06:14:04 -0800

On Feb 11, 2016, at 9:47 AM, Some User <[email-masked]> wrote:

> The files in question are of any format, they even may be mp4, bad formatted, I guess. When doing so, Usher does not retrieves nor preview pictures, nor length nor anything. If I set again some custom previews, the next time Usher has to display them, it does the same : crawles until it dies to black preview.

I'm following up on this with Peter (our founder/programmer), so expect a longer/better answer soon. However, I can say that using Usher with the movies located on a network share is usually troublesome - it's something that was never considered when Usher was originally written many years ago. The need to "watch" a bit of every movie on the network share can really drive network traffic up, and if there are problem movies, troubles can escalate. We recommend keeping all movie files local for the best Usher experience.

That won't help with the black preview/crashing problems you're having; they are most likely due to one or more bad movie files that are crashing QuickTime, which in turn crashes Usher. If you can identify and remove those files, that would also help. 

I'll post more once I hear back from Peter.

regards,
-rob.

---

From: Some User <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2016 09:47:39 -0800 (PST)

I'll try to explain it the best I can...

Since I installed your last update (1.1.13), I noticed some movies get a 
black preview where before there was a picture. Those movies had been 
applied a custom preview picture, either by using the menu item or pasting 
manually a custom preview picture in the "Info" panel. I didn't try to 
reinstall a previous version to see if preview are effectively kept in the 
library but not displayed in v1.1.13 or if they are indeed trashed. What I 
can see is that when I happen to "pass-by" those files in my library, I can 
see "ushercrawler" process increase its cpu usage and network use 
drastically (the said library's files reside on a network share) until it 
fails to preview the movies and display a black preview...

The files in question are of any format, they even may be mp4, bad 
formatted, I guess. When doing so, Usher does not retrieves nor preview 
pictures, nor length nor anything. If I set again some custom previews, the 
next time Usher has to display them, it does the same : crawles until it 
dies to black preview.

Great app, by the way, many thanks, ManyTricks...

Regards.