Worst Metadata Editing Performance...EVER!

[Jason Dunn]

[The title of this post is meant to be said in Comic Book Guy's voice.]



Anyone running Vista is probably used to seeing sluggish performance. I'd kind of forgotten how fast file move/copy functions were under XP, so I'm getting accustomed to thinking of Vista as just being slow when it comes to working with files. I was shocked from my low-expectations stupor tonight though when I tried to edit a metadata attribute on some video files. I was doing nothing more than right clicking on the file, selecting properties, switching to the Details tab, and adding a title and description then clicking OK.

Doing this process three times rapidly resulted in tremendous hard drive grind for minutes on end - the kind of grind that you'd expect if you were asking your hard drive to copy 3 GB worth of files rather than simply edit six pieces of metadata. I'm baffled at Vista's behaviour: changing the metadata should result in the header of the file being updated, nothing more. Yet my system (15,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor drive, Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme 2.97 Ghz, 3 GB RAM) was brought to its knees by this simple procedure - I shudder to think how long a lesser system would take to perform the same task.

What on earth was Windows Vista doing?

[Jason Dunn]

[The title of this post is meant to be said in Comic Book Guy's voice.]



Anyone running Vista is probably used to seeing sluggish performance. I'd kind of forgotten how fast file move/copy functions were under XP, so I'm getting accustomed to thinking of Vista as just being slow when it comes to working with files. I was shocked from my low-expectations stupor tonight though when I tried to edit a metadata attribute on some video files. I was doing nothing more than right clicking on the file, selecting properties, switching to the Details tab, and adding a title and description then clicking OK.

Doing this process three times rapidly resulted in tremendous hard drive grind for minutes on end - the kind of grind that you'd expect if you were asking your hard drive to copy 3 GB worth of files rather than simply edit six pieces of metadata. I'm baffled at Vista's behaviour: changing the metadata should result in the header of the file being updated, nothing more. Yet my system (15,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor drive, Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme 2.97 Ghz, 3 GB RAM) was brought to its knees by this simple procedure - I shudder to think how long a lesser system would take to perform the same task.

What on earth was Windows Vista doing?

[Underwater Mike]

And this is why, a year after Vista's release, I'm still in no hurry to build a new machine and upgrade from XP Pro.

[ctmagnus]

Originally Posted by Jason Dunn

...edit six pieces of metadata.

fwiw, I've noticed that changing some metadata results in a minimal data transfer to Mozy's online backup, while changing other metadata results in the program deciding that the entire file has changed. Perhaps that's the case here?

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by Underwater Mike

And this is why, a year after Vista's release, I'm still in no hurry to build a new machine and upgrade from XP Pro.

There's so many great things about Vista, but the ugly points in Vista are really glaring sometimes. :?

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by ctmagnus

I've noticed that changing some metadata results in a minimal data transfer to Mozy's online backup, while changing other metadata results in the program deciding that the entire file has changed.

Hmm. Interesting. I wonder what kind of metadata changes would cause changes in the actual file data? I wonder if some metadata changes only the header, while some metadata changes the file itself? That seems strange to me, but I really don't know enough about how WMV files are constructed.