The VideoLAN Forums

For long time I used VLC 1.1.0 and it worked fine. In March I switched to VLC 2.0.0 without any problems. The first recording (with red recording button) of a livestream (TV) was stored as ASF-File on the harddisk.

Problem:
Whenever I open the folder with all the stored ASF-files in windows explorer I have problems with excessive CPU utilization (>25%) by the Windows 7 process "dllhost.exe". Explorer reacts very slowly. The thumbnails of all files are fine except of the new stored ASF-File, only the VLC-icon is shown. Starting with double-click starts the VLC-Player, but nothing happens. When I kill the dllhost.exe-task in taskmanager player starts playing the file und explorer works fine again until changing folder und open again the folder with ASF-file.

Postings I found on the web suggest an association with a broken codec. I removed VLC and any codec from the pc without changing the behaviour. I reinstalled all codec in newest version and VLC 2.0.1. No Change. I moved the ASF-file to another folder. Now the problem was in this folder!

Solving:
I reinstalled VLC 1.1 from ftp and the recorded ASF-files are fine.

I tested recording with nightly build vlc-2.1.0-git-20120423-0005 and vlc-2.1.0-git-20120422-0403 (64bit). The same problem again. While recording the dllhost.exe task starts and ends again. In windows explorer the correct thumbnail is shown. When pressing the red recording button in VLC to stop the recording and closing the new file dllhost.exe task starts again and runs with 25% of CPU utilization. The thumbnail switches in this moment to VLC-icon an explorer reacts slowly until I kill the dllhost task.

Is there anyone who can confirm this?

Thanx

VLC doesn't install any codecs to your system. It is issue with Windows Preview which chokes with certain files. Usually the easiest thing is to disable the preview completely or fix the problematic files by remuxing them.

I know this. Can you explain me why this problem exists since VCL 2.0.0? Before there was no problem with this.

I have no clue. The file association code should be almost be the same as in 1.1.x release. And it is hard to debug this.

I have no clue. The file association code should be almost be the same as in 1.1.x release. And it is hard to debug this.

I noticed a difference between the ASF files, created by VLC 1.1.10 and VLC 2.0:
VLC 1.1.10:
------------------
$ mediainfo cam12-2012-05-01-00-43-46.asf
General
Complete name : cam12-2012-05-01-00-43-46.asf
Format : Windows Media
File size : 359 MiB
Duration : 10mn 0s
Overall bit rate : 5 012 Kbps

Video
ID : 1
Format : JPEG
Codec ID : MJPG
Description of the codec : Unknown Video
Bit rate : 4 807 Kbps
Width : pixel0
Height : pixel0
Color space : YUV
Bit depth : 8 bits
Compression mode : Lossy

-------------------

VLC 2.0:
------------------
$ mediainfo cam1/2012-05-01/cam1-2012-05-01-03-52-42.asf
General
Complete name : cam1/2012-05-01/cam1-2012-05-01-03-52-42.asf
Format : Windows Media
File size : 338 MiB
Maximum Overall bit rate : 512 Kbps

Video
ID : 1
Format : JPEG
Codec ID : MJPG
Description of the codec : Unknown Video
Width : pixel0
Height : pixel0
Color space : YUV
Bit depth : 8 bits
Compression mode : Lossy
------------------------

There are no duration and bitrate info in 2.0 variant. It's may be a reason of these problems.


Spurtnix: Please could you check your files with mediainfo (http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/ru/Download/Windows)?

There are no duration and bitrate info in 2.0 variant. It's may be a reason of these problems.

That can be it. If you remux the problematic file with asfbin, does the issue vanish?

There are no duration and bitrate info in 2.0 variant. It's may be a reason of these problems.

That can be it. If you remux the problematic file with asfbin, does the issue vanish?

That's odd. Why would the VLC developers make a change in the program that creates CORRUPT files when BEFORE it DIDN'T? Normally a software dev team is supposed to REMOVE bugs from NEW features, not INTRODUCE bugs into OLD and PREVIOUSLY WORKING features.

Well I've gone back to using a "legacy" version of VLC player. Between version 1.0.0 and 2.0.5 the devs have really screwed up the program, introducing MANY bugs that make it not work and these REALLY come out on Win7 x64 (the OS on my comp). From this web site http://www.oldapps.com/VLC_Player.php?M ... d=noscript I've actually downgraded my VLC player back to version 1.0.0. It worked fine back then and provided all the functionality I'd ever need in a media player short of RTMP playing (and even now that's just beta VLC stuff, and quite buggy from what I've tried of it). But for most playing and streaming needs, I find 1.0.0 works quite well, and it doesn't lock up my dllhost.exe (which causes all the rest of Windows to start being buggy, including errors when trying to open a copy of Windows Explorer, or a Windows start menu button on the task bar that refuses to open the start menu). ONLY way to fix this once dllhost is locked up to go to close VLC player, then go to task manager and under the processes tab end both dllhost.exe and explorer.exe and then start explorer again by in taskmanager going to file menu, new task, and type in "explorer" and hit the enter key. In this situation MOST average computer users would simply reboot the computer with startmenu>shutdown>restart, and in the event they couldn't access the start menu, the average computer user would pull the plug on the computer and plug it back in to force a hard restart (NOT a good thing to do if you can avoid it)

Serious a MEDIA PLAYER should NOT cause such an OS instability as to force the average computer to RISK DAMAGING their computer in order to simply regain normal use of their computer.

This isn't a minor bug in the current version (2.0+). This is MAJOR BUG THAT THE DEVS SHOULD ATTEND TO IMMEDIATELY!

Until the devs figure out how to fix this. I highly suggest to EVERYONE that they downgrade their version of VLC player back to a pre 2.0 version. And as I said in the top paragraph, version 1.0.0 worked fine for me.

You can get all the old versions of VLC player at http://www.oldapps.com/VLC_Player.php?M ... d=noscript

We still wait for your patches.

We still wait for your patches.

What patches?

The patches for the "MAJOR BUG THAT [you think] SHOULD ATTEND[ed] TO IMMEDIATELY".

Fix that worked for me:
1. Install this thing: http://www.babelsoft.net/products.htm#download
2. Once its installed, open it and go under file formats(it might go there for you), check all the video formats that you don't get thumbnails of in folders.
(For me I checked everything under flash video, MPEG-4 Part 14, and Windows Media, as it seemed to be mainly FLV and MP4 that was screwing my dllhost up)

Check if it worked
-Go to your video folder with the video files previously causing dllhost to explode, and the green bar thing at the top should finish, thumbnails should show up (if they don't go check off more things with the method explained above in 2.), and dllhost shouldn't explode.

I had a similar problem (same problem of dllhost taking up tons of memory), and found out that it was apparently caused by windows epic failing at making thumbnail previews. Thus, after hours of installing crap and trying other 'fixes' that didn't work at all, I tried downloading the extension linked above that previews thumbnails. I proceeded to do what I listed in the instructions in the top area of this post and dllhost didn't explode when I went into the folders that previously caused it to. Also, all of the thumbnails that previously would not load loaded, with the exception of one, but nonetheless dllhost didn't explode for that one, so I'm happy.

Posted here cuz this thread came up a lot when I searched for this problem, I'll post it in the other thread that came up a lot for me when I searched for this problem too. If the fix works for you guys as well, please go ahead and post it in other threads that came up a lot for you when you searched. I wasted way too much time getting this fixed. >_>