The VideoLAN Forums

After installing 0.9.2 I decided I might try using VLC as my default player. After a bit of searching, I found the media library feature (which is kind of sneakily tucked in there, I'd add an explicit option for it in the "Media" dropdown because right now it's a bit hard to find; I almost concluded there wasn't one). I naturally tried to add all my music to the library. VLC hung and crashed (fairly gracefully) after ~10-20 seconds. My music directory is >30GB and contains subdirectories and sub-subdirectories, so I guess it isn't too surprising. I reorganized into alphabetical chunks and found VLC also crashes when I add too much in one session, but works fine when I close and relaunch it after adding each <10GB chunk.

Also, is there a way to get the playlist to show the "artist" and "id#" fields every session?

Btw, it also seems that VLC may not read all the metadata that it should when adding songs to the library, since it displays many song titles in ugly ways like "file:///LongDirectoryPath/filename.mp3", making it all but useless.

The search function works really well, though.

Well, man, a few things.

If you close with Artist and ID opened, they should be back on next start.... If they don't, blame me and I'll fix ASAP.

It will parse metadata if you ask him to do it in the preferences... or at the first start.

Closing VLC with Artist and ID fields opened does not bring them back on the next start.

Metadata for some songs does get read, and Playlist->"Automatically preparse files" is checked, but most songs nevertheless aren't getting parsed (about 90%). Winamp sees all these songs correctly so I think my metadata is fine. I never tried to use these features before so I don't know if this behavior is the same as in 0.8.6.

Closing VLC with Artist and ID fields opened does not bring them back on the next start.

Confirmed on my machine too.

If you close with Artist and ID opened, they should be back on next start.... If they don't, blame me and I'll fix ASAP.

same problem here, the columns keep getting reset every time I restart VLC, even when I just switch between Playlist and Media Library views. Additionally, If I rearrange added columns and then switch views, they become blank columns that cannot be removed.

EDIT: Problem no longer occurs in version 0.9.4. Good work!

To add to what pathway has already observed:

I also tried using VLC as my default (mainly audio) player, and I also tried adding a large number of files to the VLC Library - with disastrous results. Adding them in smaller chunks does work as observed, but that takes too much time on a very large database. Another negative to consider is that VLC chews a lot of CPU power whilst adding the data, thus making multi-tasking almost impossible.

Could the developers please advise what the limitations of the VLC Library function are?

+1

As others have mentioned I was also looking into making VLC my default player. I have a very large library (20000+ files, 180G+ space).
Loading the information into the library actually went suprisingly well. VLC gnawed at the info for 1/2 hour or so and then displayed the info fine. Search feature also worked fine.
For me the problem is that VLC seems to spend a very long time analysing the data in the library each time it starts up. After I added all my songs to the library VLC needed approx. 5 minutes to start up.
Deleting the info brought the startup time back to ~0 again. Would it be possible to fire off a background thread to do the startup analysis so that this does not affect the startup time of the whole application?

Chr

Not yet.

There is a specific problem with adding directories that I've noticed and it doesn't matter what size the directory is.

I first noticed with win32 0.9.2 but it's still there with win32 0.9.4, when you add a directory it does not discriminate between (known)Media files and non-media files (or unknown Media files such as .amr files.) In most cases we keep our media files seperate from documents and such so it doesn't cause a problem, however in my case I had browsed some of the album art in Windows Explorer with Thumbnails on. This created Desktop.ini files and Thumbs.db files which caused the crash when they were added to the library.

I've since tried adding a folder containing a mixture of Word/Excel documents and media files with the same results.

The crash occurs not immediately when the file is addded, but when that particular file is parsed for metadata. When the crash occurs you can still scroll up and down and see the specific file causing the crash.

I was hoping for a reply either confirming other people were seeing this bug/crash on other versions/platforms and hopefully that a fix is possible or telling me I was mad and I should go back to thee padded cell I escaped from and try compiling the source for myself.
Given that, the silence as been slightly uncomfortable so as a question can anyone try this out and see if they repeat my results?

I'm using 0.9.8a and it seems okay loading 11GB, There were some non-music files in there, it didn't seem to hang at all, but it still adds them to the library. I think there should be a file extension test, based off association preferences maybe? so it only loads files it should be able to play.
I'll try again with my larger collection and see (~60GB) if there's any performance issues.
looks good though, I've just had a fresh install and this is the only media player I'm using so far (was using mm)

I think we already have this, although it's a blacklist rather than a whitelist.