Interconnect IT - Liverpool Web Designers and Developers

Video Thumbnailing Problems

XP has a nice feature in that it thumbnails your pictures and videos in your explorer windows.

But… with videos it just shows the first frame of the video which is often black. So it’s not that useful. Even worse, over the network or from a slow drive, because it has to open each video file in turn, it can cause a dramatic downturn in performance. And then there’s the problem of partially downloaded videos where there isn’t a first frame yet - that can cause explorer to crash.

So to get things to work right and fast in Explorer it’s necessary to switch off video thumbnailing while allowing other thumbnails to continue fine.

Here’s how to disable video thumbnailing alone:

Click on Start, then run.

In the box, type regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll

You should then get a confirmation that it’s done.

And in images:






And now your videos will no longer thumbnail and your browser crashes will be reduced.Thanks go to James here at Interconnect IT for the handy tips.