fix quicklookd and transmission when downloading video
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit…it’s the only way to be sure.
Is your Mac’s CPU pegged when Transmission (or any other Mac BitTorrent client) downloads video? That’s because quicklookd — the QuickLook daemon that sneaks around and builds thumbnails of your movie files, is trying to build a thumbnail of a chunk of video that doesn’t exist yet. Because BitTorrent clients allot the disk space non-contiguously and then fill in the data, your Mac is confused. End the confusion with two Terminal commands so long that there is no center content well that can contain them:
sudo cp -r /System/Library/Frameworks/QuickLook.framework/Resources/Generators/Movie.qlgenerator ~/Documents/Movie.qlgenerator sudo rm -r /System/Library/Frameworks/QuickLook.framework/Resources/Generators/Movie.qlgenerator
NOTE: So what did that do? The first command made a backup copy of the problematic Movie.qlgenerator in your Documents folder. The second command removed it. On the downside, you will lose the ability to “QuickLook” video files, and no thumbnails will be created or maintained for video files. On the upside, you will instantly gain ~75% of your CPU back as your Mac stops struggling in vain to create a thumbnail for a video frame that hasn’t actually been downloaded yet.
~Jeff
June 13th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
So how easily reversible is this? I do use Quicklook for video, since it loads much faster than VLC for the most part…
June 14th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
To reverse it completely, you’d do a:
sudo cp -r ~/Documents/Movie.qlgenerator /System/Library/Frameworks/QuickLook.framework/Resources/Generators/Movie.qlgenerator
and then:
qlmanage -r
to rebuild the QuickLook generator list.
~Jeff
June 14th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
…man that looks shitty. but it works. essentially it copies back the movie qlgenerator file to where OS X expects it and then tells OS X to rebuild the list of QuickLook plug-ins.
June 15th, 2008 at 2:43 am
Awesome, thanks! Helps out a lot when I’m snagging more than 5 videos at a time, since mds was, indeed, killing VLC’s frame rate.
June 18th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
July 18th, 2008 at 1:10 am
August 10th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
i never leave comments, but that’s the best tip ever. thanks!