VCGProxyFileManager9.exe is Evil

[BradG]

Hi,

 

I am about to give up on Roxio Easy Media 9 and thought I would try a post on this site to see if Roxio or anyone else can help.

 

First, before anyone from Roxio asks:

1) I am running on an extremely fast machine which many 100's of Gbytes of free disk space. The computer is dedicated to record video from TV and editing.

2) It does not have any viruses or spyware

3) I have used MSConfig to tune the machine

4) The disk is always completely defragmented

In short, it is in perfect working order.

 

When I go to edit a video in MyDVD the CPU useage goes to 100%. The process taking all the resources is VCGProxyFileManager9.exe which belongs to the Roxio 9 suite. I know from observing the system that it is creating huge TEMP files and then for no apparent reason deleting them. From other discussion groups, the answer from Roxio is that it is needed in order to keep the video and audio in sync. Worse is that that the TEMP files that it is creating have nothing to do with the project I am currently editing.

 

With VCGProxyFileManager9 running, the performance hit on the CPU and Disk is so bad that the jog wheel in the video editor will not work. Video editing becomes so slow that it is almost not useable.

 

I have downloaded Ulead's VIdeo suite and the performance on this same machine is fantastic. So, it is obvious that this type of process is not needed for video editing.

 

It is clear from other web forums that this is a serious flaw in Roxio 9. Is anyone from Ulead prepared to admit that this is a problem and provide a solution?

[gi7omy]

Perhaps Brad you would be so good as to tell us just how we can offer help to someone who is so busy complaining that they don't bother to tell anyone just WHAT problem they're having?

 

Sorry - but no-one here got a pass grade in Mind Reading 101

[bimicher]

James,

 

What is your problem? Here is what you said on my initial post that started this thread:

"In that no one else seems to have this "serious flaw" how do you purpose they fix it?

"

 

Clearly many other people are experiencing this problem. You can find numerous posts on this forum and many other forums regarding this problem.

 

Instead of commenting on the people that are posting by telling them they are whiney, why don't you contribute and try and solve the problem. If you have nothing to contribute to the problem, then just say nothing at all.

 

Apparently this forum bestows the honour of "Digital Guru" based on number of posts alone. Even when those posts are verbal swipes at people who are trying to get problems solved. I would have thought this title would be reserved for people who actually help solve problems.

 

To answer HiMc question, I went the money back route. I opened several support tickets and had a conference call with support and they were unbale to resolve the problem. Too bad - there is a lot of good stuff in this product, but in the end the speed of editing made it unuseable.

 

All you have to do is go into Task Manager and stop the Proxy processor. Thats what I do and have never had a problem.

[BradG]

As a sad follow-up to this post, I just tried one last posting on the Roxio support website. The web page is stuck saying that you need to specify a topic even though a topic has already been chosen. It will not let you post a new support topic.

 

It would appear that their product, and now their support site doesn't work.

[james_hardin]

In that no one else seems to have this "serious flaw" how do you purpose they fix it?

 

You do know that Ulead has absolutely nothing to do with Roxio/Sonic?

 

One Topic that showed up in Search was this one. Read through it and see if it is of help to you.

[BradG]

In that no one else seems to have this "serious flaw" how do you purpose they fix it?

 

You do know that Ulead has absolutely nothing to do with Roxio/Sonic?

 

One Topic that showed up in Search was this one. Read through it and see if it is of help to you.

 

 

Well to start, they could answer supprot requests with something more meaningful then the normal answer of reboot your machine and check for viruses.

 

If I am the only one having this problem, how come I can search this forum and find other articles? A user named Spunky in Jan 2007 is having the same problem. If you google this process, you can also find hits.

 

I understand that Ulead has nothing to do with Roxio. I downloaded this competative product and on the same machine it worked very well. This is basic trouble shooting. If the other video editing suite also ran slow then I would have looked to a problem with my computer.

[BradG]

In that no one else seems to have this "serious flaw" how do you purpose they fix it?

 

You do know that Ulead has absolutely nothing to do with Roxio/Sonic?

 

One Topic that showed up in Search was this one. Read through it and see if it is of help to you.

 

I just did some quick searching. Ignoring the hits on google, check out just a few of the posting I found on this this web forum and then tell me no one else is having a problem with this process:

http://forums.support.roxio.com/index.php?...roxyfilemanager

 

http://forums.support.roxio.com/lofiversio...php/t17356.html

 

http://forums.support.roxio.com/index.php?...xy+file+manager

 

http://forums.support.roxio.com/index.php?...amp;#entry39447

 

http://forums.support.roxio.com/index.php?...amp;#entry18316

[james_hardin]

I concur... I have to wait 15-20 minutes for this VCGProxyUselessFileManager9 to finish doing what it's doing before I can do any real work in VideoWave 9.... Unacceptable in my opinion. I'm a software engineer myself, and this would never be permitted in the products I design.

So far you have made 3 posts and all have been whiney…

 

As a "Software Engineer" do you actually have anything to contribute?

 

Do you have a question?

[BradG]

Hi gi7omy,

 

I had started this thread. As other people who have posted have noted, I have left a very detailed description of the symptoms and what I had tried to resolve the problem.

 

No mind reading required - just give the thread a read.

[gi7omy]

The comments were aimed at Andrei actually - not one of his posts has ever said just what his pronlem is (and he did hi-jack the thread)

[B R H]

I also found that muvee autoProducer 5.0 SE hangs. Roxio CinePlayer plays awful random noise (static) for the audio. MyDVD 7 & 8 will play the video just fine (with audio). VCGProxyFileManager9.exe seems more stable since doing the Repair install. CinePlayer & CineMagic won't open at the same time. Probably has to do with using hardware for mgp encoding & decoding, but a "hardware in use by another application" message or revert to software encoding/decoding would make a LOT more sense than software hanging! Total garbage software!

[knight-gkla]

got the same problem. it makes videowave9 unuseable.

[BradG]

Other products DO this, too. Especially Adobe Premiere Elements which DOES NOT EDIT MPEG at all. That program must convert MPEG files to its own format before you even start editing. All editing software uses some sort of file caching. They just do it differently so other apps may seem faster during edit, but may take longer when rendering.

 

Neither of you mention the speed of your computer or specs. I feel the posted specs for EMC9 are way too low for Video editing. How much free space on your hard drive will also radically affect video editing.

 

Hi,

 

While I am sure that video requires some form of caching or file management, if it makes the product un-useable then something is not right. I am currently evaluating the ULead DVD Suite. Ignoring the edit time, Ulead redners a 2 hour movie to dual layer DVD just slight faster then Roxio 9. The big difference is that the Ulead editing is lightening fast. So however Ulead is accomplishing the task, it doesn't impact editing or rendering.

 

My machine should be more then enough. The rough specs are:

1) HP Media Center edition

2) Microsoft XP Media Center Edition, SP2

3) AMD Athlon 4200+ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor

4) 2 Gbytes RAM

5) Dual 300 Gbytes SATA drives

6) 100's of Gbytes of free space

7) ATI Radeon graphics

 

I know there are lots of people successfully using Roxio. So I am still hopeful that this will work. However, I have also seen that other people are having this same problem. I note that one of the guys on this forum had the same problem and solved it by returning Roxio for a refund.

 

Hopefully I can get this figured out.

[Larry]

Every company designs and engineers programs like this differently, so how they work and a users experience is going to vary depending on a whole bunch of factors.

 

In the case of EMC 9, the type of video file, hardware (cpu, ram, video card, etc), other software that's running, etc will all have an effect on how well it works for you.

 

You mentioned some good things you've already done that should help. There's still the matter of RAM, CPU, and Video Card specs that could be having an effect tho.

 

Also, if you are using compressed video source files, like mpeg2, that will cause it to be slower because the program has to un-compress it on the fly as you work on it. If you were using DV-AVI files for example, you wouldn't notice the same slowness.

[ggrussell]

why Roxio needs to do this but other video editing software products do not.

Other products DO this, too. Especially Adobe Premiere Elements which DOES NOT EDIT MPEG at all. That program must convert MPEG files to its own format before you even start editing. All editing software uses some sort of file caching. They just do it differently so other apps may seem faster during edit, but may take longer when rendering.

 

Neither of you mention the speed of your computer or specs. I feel the posted specs for EMC9 are way too low for Video editing. How much free space on your hard drive will also radically affect video editing.

[B R H]

The movies trimmed in VideoWave that I've been having trouble with now play properly in WMP 11. This started working after selected "Turn on Direct X Video Acceleration" in WMP 11. What's bizarre is that I can disable it now & the video still plays!

 

I think the problems might be related to a recent Automatic Update from either HP or Microsoft. I normally disable Automatic Updates, but have let it go on my new computer thinking problems with this sort of thing was maybe a thing of the past by now.

 

I still have Sonic MyDVD 7 installed. It came with the machine & has never caused trouble before. I recall recently seeing some sort of update from HP for the Sonic software. I may try removing all the Sonic stuff, but it seems I need some of those codecs for functionality in VideoWave & Windows Movie Maker! The Sonic "filters" are the only ones that give me full functionality in Windows Movie Maker! I'm also seeing all sorts of strange behavior in Windows Movie Maker depending on which "filters" I enable/disable. I just left them all enabled in the past & everything worked fine until whatever recently happened broke all this stuff!

 

I wish it were more obvious which codecs supply what functionality & what functionality Roxio actually needs! At some point it may be easier to just remove all the extra stuff & re-install Roxio EMC 9 assuming Roxio provides all that is needed.

[gi7omy]

Not overlooking the fact James that he concurred with a thread that ended back in April - maybe he got infected with the 'Millennium Bug' a few years back and is running badly lagged

[BradG]

Hi,

 

Thanks for the reply.

 

Here are the rough specs on my video machine:

- HP Media Center TV PC

- Windows XP Media Edition Service Pack 2

- AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core running at 2.2Ghz

- 2 Gbytes RAM

- 2 x 300 Gbytes SATA Drives

- ATI Radeon Video

 

I am recording TV which writes in dvr-ms format. I then use a nice utility called DVRMS Tool Box which converts dvr-ms format to mpeg2.

 

The video files due tend to be large. A one hour TV show typically generates a 3.5 Gbyte file and a feature length movie would typically generate a file of 6 Gbytes or larger.

 

Attempting to edit the native dvr-ms files in Roxio is not efficient as it has to convert them first prior to editing, hence the reason I use DVRMS Tool Box.

 

Prior to purchasing the Roxio suite I checked out their specifications page. It says "Supports TiVo Recordings and TV Shows recorded on Windows MCE PC systems" so I had assumed that the product would be built to handle file sizes of at least a one hour tv show.

 

Any ideas on how to make this work, or do you believe that it cannot handle this size of file efficiently? My concern is in fact (as you pointed out) that the program is not engineered to handle large Mpeg2 video files efficiently.

 

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

[amac]

I'm having a similar problem with Videowave. VCGProxyFileManager9.exe sucks up my whole processing power (until I lower its priority). But it doesn't happen all the time. I'm thinking it's related to my network but haven't narrowed it down for sure.

[B R H]

I see the same problem. One thing our systems have in common is the AMD Athlon 64-bit X2 processor although mine is only a 3800+. I have an NVidia 6500LE video chipset, 2 GB RAM, plenty of drive space, running WMC 2005 SP2, 32-bit. I have the latest NVidia drivers & all MS updates applied.

 

When VideoWave works, it seems to work just fine. In other words, it is reasonably responsive & gets the job done (no comment on the UI & programming quality in general). It seems to hang more often when I'm muliti-tasking despite the other processes being tiny & irrelevent as far as CPU & memory usage.

 

I've also noticed that if I terminate Videowave (don't really have a choice), VCGProxyFileManager9.exe remains an active process. I can run VideoWave again, but when I save the same file I was working on, the audio is either not encoded at all or encoded improperly because there is no sound! Other mpg files play fine. If I terminate VideoWave & the errant VCGProxyFileManager9.exe process, it still does not properly encode the audio. I think this confirms the comments that the problem is related to temp or cache files & certainly involves audio encoding.

 

I haven't repeated these tasks enough to be convinced there aren't other variables, but right now I really think this is a bug in VideoWave & may have to do with using AMD CPUs. I do think Roxio could reproduce this problem easily enough. I suppose we will have to wait to purchase the "fix" in version 10.

 

PS. I think all the silly temp files are created because Roxio insists on playing the file all the time! Why does Roxio insist on doing this? Is there any way to turn it off? I don't want the file I'm working on to be played while I'm still working on it! I am perfectly capable of pressing Play when & if I am ready to do so! Playing by default is a total waste of CPU & memory!

[monkey_coder]

I also found that muvee autoProducer 5.0 SE hangs. Roxio CinePlayer plays awful random noise (static) for the audio. MyDVD 7 & 8 will play the video just fine (with audio). VCGProxyFileManager9.exe seems more stable since doing the Repair install. CinePlayer & CineMagic won't open at the same time. Probably has to do with using hardware for mgp encoding & decoding, but a "hardware in use by another application" message or revert to software encoding/decoding would make a LOT more sense than software hanging! Total garbage software!

 

 

Agreed. They just keep adding features and releasing new versions even though ALL new versions inherit the SAME problems: MSI problems, permissions problems, resource hogging, C++ errors, excessive registry modification, high instances of installation corruption, excessive use of background processes (both in number and thread usage)...the list keeps going. Datamining and new versions seem to be the only top priorities. They also keep ignoring the issues causing "end-consumer workarounds" to be the order of the day. Appears these have been major problems since version 7.5. The die-hard rox fans fight issues with excuses, now I've learned this first hand today. No one in support likes a whiney customer, but sheesh man, do a LITTLE more QA!! Pumping new versions out seems to be top priority around there.

[grandpabruce]

Agreed. They just keep adding features and releasing new versions even though ALL new versions inherit the SAME problems: MSI problems, permissions problems, resource hogging, C++ errors, excessive registry modification, high instances of installation corruption, excessive use of background processes (both in number and thread usage)...the list keeps going. Datamining and new versions seem to be the only top priorities. They also keep ignoring the issues causing "end-consumer workarounds" to be the order of the day. Appears these have been major problems since version 7.5. The die-hard rox fans fight issues with excuses, now I've learned this first hand today. No one in support likes a whiney customer, but sheesh man, do a LITTLE more QA!! Pumping new versions out seems to be top priority around there.

 

Well, it's good to see you found the error of your ways and cleaned up your language, anyway.

[BradG]

I'm having a similar problem with Videowave. VCGProxyFileManager9.exe sucks up my whole processing power (until I lower its priority). But it doesn't happen all the time. I'm thinking it's related to my network but haven't narrowed it down for sure.

 

I too have found that it doesn't happen all the time, but probably 80% of the time. I have found that as soon as I go to edit a movie, then leave the computer alone for about 15-20 minutes, it will usually finish whatever it is doing.

 

While I was trying to solve this problem I isolated my computer from my network and from the Internet, but it didn't help the problem.

 

I found the TEMP directory that it is writing files to. These temp files are very large (gigabytes in size). The truly odd thing is that it is doing some kind of processing on mpeg files and often these files are not involved in my current video project. It's almost as if it keeps a cache of files that it needs to process.

 

I found a thread on another web forum (i.e. not a Roxio forum). They said that this process was used to keep audio and video in sync for mpeg movies. If this is true, then the question I have (as did this forum) is why Roxio needs to do this but other video editing software products do not.

 

I have already downloaded another video suite product. I haven't gotten any response from the Roxio support desk, so I am not hopeful that this is going to get solved. I believe it is a flaw in the way the product is designed, at least for processing large mpeg files.

[HicMc]

Thanks for all your work on this. I am going to give some of this a try and see how it works.

 

Any update on this or did we ask for our money back. BradG and B R H in particular as they gave a good description.

 

Same problem - MyDVD, large DVD ready MPEG2 (45 minutes to 2 hours), good system status (trust me). Every time you load a movie (MPEG2), VCGproxyfilemanager takes +90% CPU creating a file in C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Roxio\VideoUI9\Proxy, take a few minutes and at the end deletes it. If you do anything to the file - edit, preview etc it runs again. Queues the tasks so if do 3 things quickly (add, edit, preview) it runs 3 times and if you exit MyDVD before its finished it continues to run until it does !

 

I'm not turned off EMC 9 yet, its got lots to offer, take it easy and its usable but go too fast and becomes very unresponsive.

 

Common theme I see is Media Center Edition.

 

Anyone else got time to reply till we see if its wide spread or just some unique (unlucky) few !

 

Anyone using large MPEG2 who doesnt have the issue - what is the source of the video and the Windows version.

 

Anyone from Roxio care to let us know its purpose - various explainations but none stack up. The files I found let in the directoy are PCM audio (.WAV) and they are audio ! Are we extracting the audio ! Is this a fix for audio sync ! Dont leave me guessing !

[BradG]

The movies trimmed in VideoWave that I've been having trouble with now play properly in WMP 11. This started working after selected "Turn on Direct X Video Acceleration" in WMP 11. What's bizarre is that I can disable it now & the video still plays!

 

I think the problems might be related to a recent Automatic Update from either HP or Microsoft. I normally disable Automatic Updates, but have let it go on my new computer thinking problems with this sort of thing was maybe a thing of the past by now.

 

I still have Sonic MyDVD 7 installed. It came with the machine & has never caused trouble before. I recall recently seeing some sort of update from HP for the Sonic software. I may try removing all the Sonic stuff, but it seems I need some of those codecs for functionality in VideoWave & Windows Movie Maker! The Sonic "filters" are the only ones that give me full functionality in Windows Movie Maker! I'm also seeing all sorts of strange behavior in Windows Movie Maker depending on which "filters" I enable/disable. I just left them all enabled in the past & everything worked fine until whatever recently happened broke all this stuff!

 

I wish it were more obvious which codecs supply what functionality & what functionality Roxio actually needs! At some point it may be easier to just remove all the extra stuff & re-install Roxio EMC 9 assuming Roxio provides all that is needed.

 

Thanks for all your work on this. I am going to give some of this a try and see how it works.

[John T Smith]

May (or may not be) 100% related, but I solved my problem with MyDVD9 based on the answer near the bottom of this message thread

 

http://forums.support.roxio.com/index.php?showtopic=20685