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View Full Version : Worst Metadata Editing Performance...EVER!


Jason Dunn
11-22-2007, 01:00 PM
[The title of this post is meant to be said in Comic Book Guy's voice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Book_Guy).]

http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/metadata-renaming-lockup.jpg

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
11-22-2007, 06:04 PM
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
11-22-2007, 08:22 PM
...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
11-22-2007, 09:34 PM
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
11-22-2007, 09:39 PM
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.