Video loading taking ages.

W11 23H2 Build 22631.4317
I have over 1,000 video clips that I have recently uploaded to my PC from my cameras. They are all MP4. When I open their folder the video symbols appear, in this case the VLC cone symbol. The computer then displays the egg timer while the symbols are being replaced with the preview pictures but this has taken ages. The previews are appearing at the rate of around 4 per second at their best with the occasional pause of a few seconds but mostly it is 2 seconds per file. I am writing this post and the egg timer is still there. Around 20 minutes and still loading.
I have a fairly high spec PC with Ryzen 9 3900XT, 32GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060Ti.
Can anyone point me in the right direction of what to check, or maybe this is normal. I'm sure video clips didn't used to take this long.
25 minutes and still loading.
I should add, the CPU meter is at 1%, the hard drive with the files is at 100%.

Tried a different video player? Also are you using a third party thumbnail program like Icaros?

Do you need the Preview pics? With the folder open click on View. You can change how they show in File Explorer.

steveg said:

Tried a different video player? Also are you using a third party thumbnail program like Icaros?

Click to expand...

When they are loading, I'm not using a video player. The VLC icon is just from the file type settings. I have no thumbnail program.

Winuser said:

Do you need the Preview pics? With the folder open click on View. You can change how they show in File Explorer.

Click to expand...

Good point. I imagine list view will appear almost instantly. I will check that. However, I am still surprised that it takes so long to generate thumbnails.

sydh said:

Good point. I imagine list view will appear almost instantly. I will check that. However, I am still surprised that it takes so long to generate thumbnails.

Click to expand...

Windows takes a while to generate thumbnails for large volumes of videos for the first time. Something I've noticed also though never as many as you're doing.

I tried changing VIEW in File Explorer from ICONS to DETAILS but I still have the same issue. The DATE and the LENGTH columns take a long time to populate but it is quicker than the thumbnails. Once again, the harddisk is running at 100%. I'm having no problems with the harddisk and it checks out as healthy. Maybe these long loading times are normal but I cannot imagine professional studios who also work with thousands of clips have this problem. Their productivity would drop considerably while waiting for files to load.
I wondered if moving the files to my SSD would be better to work with, but this folder is 165GB. I have ample room for them on the SSD but I'm unsure if this would have a negative impact on the SSD with so much data being written and modified by my video editor. Or am I being over-cautious?

steveg said:

Windows takes a while to generate thumbnails for large volumes of videos for the first time. Something I've noticed also though never as many as you're doing.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I've noticed the same phenomenon on my Windows

I have folders with many videos. Of course I have set them to display lists or details. Opening the folder with the default sorting by name, takes 2-3 seconds. If I want to sort by date, it takes more than 10 seconds to display the contents. And my videos are less than 1000. If you have that many videos in one folder delays are normal. Have you tried moving to subfolders based by date or whatever?

sydh said:

Good point. I imagine list view will appear almost instantly. I will check that. However, I am still surprised that it takes so long to generate thumbnails.

Click to expand...

"I have over 1,000 video clips" + "the harddisk is running at 100%."

Even on a fast SSD can take a bit of time (tho, 10x faster than the best HDD). Only if all videos were stored into Ram would appear almost instantly. Your CPU, GPU and RAM - makes little difference in this case (as you've noticed in task manager - they're running at 1%) - the slow HDD is the issue.

Open Windows Search and look for "Adjust the appearance and performance" and select only the following:



You could also Disable Indexing





And Superfetch

Open Windows Search and look for "Services" - open it and scroll down to Sysmain - click on it Stop + Disabled.

This changes can help with a HDD but even so... 1000+ videos loading almost instantly - you'll need a NVMe SSD.