Version: 0.7 beta 1 (using KDE KDE 3.3.0) Compiler: gcc 3.3.4 OS: Linux Some movies take a long time to generate a thumbnail (even on a rather decent machine), resulting in high CPU usage and lots of disk activity. It would be nice to be able to disable generating previews for movies, so that only an icon (which loads immediately) is shown. At this time, one can only make movies not appear in digikam at all by clearing the field for 'movie file extensions' in the configuration dialog, but then again, this makes editing comments impossible.
kcontrol provides you with an option to disable generating thumbnails for a file with size greater than a minimum limit. also note, once the thumbnail is generated, its cached and any file/image browser you use on kde will use the same cached thumbnail
That would be fine, except that digikam doesn't seem to take this size limit into account. On my machine, maximum size for file previews in konqueror is set to 1.8 MB and digikam still generates previews even for files which are much larger (this is with version 0.7.0). Once digikam does actually take this limit into account, I'll be happy with the suggested solution.
for normal image files digikam uses its own thumbnailer and will ignore filesize. but thats not your concern. your concern is about the video thumbnails sucking up cpu and causing disk churn. digikam uses the kde standard thumbnailer for this purpose (which is why i mentioned using kcontrol to set a size limitation on the filesize for which thumbnails will be generated). I just checked out the source code for the kde thumbnailer and found that there is an additional parameter called "IgnoreMaximumSize" and if the corresponding plugin which generates the thumbnail, sets this to true, then the thumbnailer will generate the thumbnail inspite of the size limitation. if you look at videothumbnail.desktop (do a locate for it), it does exactly that. one hacky way of "fixing" the problem is to edit the file and set IgnoreMaximumSize=false. if you still want further resolution to the problem, this bug will have to reassigned to kdemultimedia (which provides the video thumbnailer plugin)
Thanks for the tip, it mostly solves my problem.
digiKam 5.4.0 bundles will use QtAV framework instead Qt5Multimedia to thumb and play video. The Slideshow tool will also support video as well. QtAV use ffmpeg codecs. It's multi-platform and will always available in OSX, Windows and Linux bundles that digiKam team provide. For Linux packagers, you will need to turn on video support at compilation time and solve QtAV dependencies... The screenshot here : https://www.flickr.com/photos/digikam/30886133553/in/dateposted-public/ ... is based on pre-release of AppImage 64 bits Linux bundle, just recompiled and post to GDrive for testing. The 32bits version is under process and will be available at the same place today evening. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BzeiVr-byqt5Y0tIRWVWelRJenM