VLC 2.0.4 UI freezes on large UPnP collection

[Broadside]

I've spent a few days searching this forum and elsewhere for some pointers, but I've drawn a blank. Hopefully someone here can shed some light.

My problem is that the VLC 2.0.4 interface freezes for a long time when I try to connect to my UPnP server on the local network. Eventually it responds again, so it seems that the client is doing something in the background which causes the UI painting to pause.

VLC 2.0.4 is installed on four different computers, running Windows 7 32-bit, Windows 7 64-bit, OS X 10.7 Lion, and Linux Mint 13 64-bit. The problem happens on all four operating systems; it's not confined to one.

Separately, I've a computer running FreeNAS 8.3.0 64-bit with the MiniDLNA plugin, serving up media for my home via UPnP.

I have compared VLC against other media players, both hardware (I have two different Internet radios at home) and software (XBMC and Windows Media Player). Of them all, only VLC exhibits this particular freezing behaviour.

As far as I can determine from observation, it looks like VLC is querying the UPnP server for every single item in the database so that it can display a nicely-formatted tree showing all the content, instead of sending a separate query each time a sublevel is accessed by the user. As I've got a monstrously huge collection (>30,000 audio files at last count, all lovingly ripped by me over the years from my equally monstrous CD collection), it takes a long time for VLC to finish doing whatever it's doing and return control to the user.

Is there a setting I've missed in VLC's UI to govern UPnP query behaviour? Is there a particular log file I can examine for further information so that I can attempt further troubleshooting? Is this behaviour simply by design as part of the programming?

[Broadside]

And in true Internet forum fashion, not long after posting I found the answer I've been seeking. As soon as I remembered the word "recursive" I found the answer straight away:

http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/4437

So, in short, VLC is programmed this way by design, and I don't have enough programming knowledge to help the developers fix it.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Yes, this is a big bug. We hope to fix soon...