GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 450241
Video thumbnail generation blocks UI far too much
Last modified: 2007-08-11 14:46:40 UTC
When browsing directories that contain videos, gthumb attempts to generate thumbnails for those video files, which is a nice idea in theory, but in practice it renders the UI completely unusable while it is generating the thumbnails. The obvious fixes are to thread the thumbnail generation, or put it out-of-process, but I'd be willing to accept a gconf preference to disable this video thumbnail functionality as I find it intolerable.
The UI is pretty unresponsive during any thumbnail generation (not just for videos). Image loading / thumbnail generation is threaded, but it seems that the threads don't yield nicely to the gtk UI thread. Patches to fix that would be welcome :-) The threading stuff is a bit over my head... - Mike
Created attachment 90870 [details] [review] patch to process UI events before thumbnailing Jason, Can you test this patch and see if it makes any difference? - Mike
No difference, unfortunately. The changes look correct (based on what I recently read) if gth_pixbuf_new_from_uri were actually called from a thread, however (after an admittedly cursory look) I don't see where this function is being called from a separate thread.
Image-loader threads are created in: libgthumb/image-loader.c:image_loader_init and thumbnail loading use image-loaders in: libgthumb/thumb-loader.c:thumb_loader_new So thumbnailing must be threaded. I think. However, I'm pretty weak in threading, so corrections are most welcome... - Mike
Oh, I might be missing the obvious here... the thumbnail *loading* is threaded, but the *generation* might not be. I'll have to stare at the code... - Mike
No, ignore my last post. Thumbnail generation is threaded. Only one thumbnail thread is running at a time, but it is different than the UI thread. (The image preloader runs 3 threads at a time). - Mike
I fixed this some day ago in gthumb-2-10.