Help me with windows explorer preview settings.

[Rheinmetall]

Is it possible in any way to stop explorer from previewing video files. This neat feature came with Windows media player 9. I could get rid of it by uninstalling MP9 but I want to keep it. Or I could turn off the web content but then I would loose picture prews. It's just handling some video files cause explorer to crash always because of the video preview window.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Rheinmetall]

I see there is no answer. Well maybe I'll learn to live with it.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

A quick google found these two ways of doing it, there is a link to a MS knowledgebase article that should help here: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=822430

Or a DIY remedy, which can be risky if you don't understand what you're doing -

WinXP is very aggresive about being user friendly, and provides a nice preview feature for showing details and snapshots of pictures and movies. But if the media-file is flawed, then the preview feature starts to scan the entire file (F.ex. with AVI and MPG/MPEG files where the header or the index at the end of the file is broken). This can lead to high CPU usage and the file being locked, so when trying move or delete the file it gives the error:

Cannot delete/move <filename>: It is being used by another proson or program. Close any programs that might be using the file and try again

Disable preview for AVI files by deleting the (Default) in registry (Make a backup first):

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT \SystemFileAssociations \.avi \shellex \PropertyHandler]
(Default) = (Value not set)

Note to disable preview for other file-types just exchange the .avi with the wanted filetype and delete the (Default) for the wanted file-type.

Note if one likes the preview feature but just cannot delete a file then one can try:

* Momentarily unregister shmedia.dll (Media File Property Extractor Shell Extension) to delete the file:

regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll
(delete the file)
regsvr32 shmedia.dll

* Rename the file so it no longer has the extension of a media file
* Create a new folder and move the file into the new folder and delete the new folder
* Close all explorer.exe and use the command-prompt.
* Boot in safemode and delete the file, as the preview feature is disabled.

Note if have a directory containing many media files (Like mp3), then the preview feature will cause a slowdown when opening the folder, because it wants to extract information for each file.

 

[Rheinmetall]

Thanks a lot! I'll get right on it.

Usually I was able to fix this kind of problems by trying different video codecs but this problem was so weird. If I double click the file quickly in the explorer before the preview window kicks in, the file opens nicely in media player but if the preview window gets it first, explorer crashes. Neat isn't it?