Windows 7 App Errors

To start over from scratch with 2500+ movies would be daunting. It takes anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes per movie to properly set up a video. No, I don't even want to think about that. I would prefer to spend more on hardware, but as it is now, I don't know that would do any good.

I wasn't having any problems with their 8.x version, only after "upgrading" to 9.1. I would go back to the 8.x version, but I got the impression that would require having a backup database from the 8.x version. I do still have one, but it is a copy, of a copy, of a copy, etc. and even if it would work, it would mean not having lost all of the entries that I made since then, and that has been hundreds.
 
You may well find the some sort of compromise such as re-entering some recent entries needs to be made to get you back on a firm footing. I am in a similar position with some thirty years or so of software development behind me and range of backups and places in which I keep them which might seem to many to be obsessive - but they are proportionate to the level of distress I would feel on losing significant parts of it. It's not possible to say for sure what may be happening but if I had to make a guess I feel that you may have hit a ceiling on the package - it may for instance be loading indexes/tables into RAM for faster lookups/sorting etc. Is archiving the existing data at the last point where you were able to run version 8 then starting to use a new package to store new data an option or has all the data got to remain in a single database?
 
I really don't know. I'm a little reluctant to experiment for fear of messing up 9.1, but it would be a worthwhile question to ask their tech. I'm still wondering if this is truly a matter of hitting the ceiling on hardware, or if say that the video card that I have is faulty in terms of it's memory utilization? I don't guess there is a definitive method of testing that...is there?

I have checked it with Unigine Heaven, but I think that it is benching everything about the card, not just video memory.
 
It does sound to me more likely a software ceiling. Here's something for you to consider - the Pro version of your software has a facility to export the data to a csv file - a more or less universal data format which may be exported to and imported from any database system worth of the name. I'd have a look into that - it should enable you to consider options of more robust packages.
 
I have the Pro version, but I don't find csv as an export option (see screenshot). I never used the export options before, except the text one, and it simply produced a list of the movies with very abbreviated set of details. I just tried to use the export to html, but it failed with the same "out of memory" error as I've been dealing with otherwise.

If this is suppose to export to csv, how would that be done, since it isn't listed as an option?
 

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Yes, I see what you mean, but since it isn't listed as an export option from the export selections, I have no idea how that could be done.

Going back through the correspondence from their tech, I found one suggestion that I had overlooked. They said that it is important to have the latest version of IE installed, since it uses some of it's components. I had never upgraded, because I had read of some problems that others had had with IE 10 and had hidden it. I went ahead and installed it, and I don't know that it solved the problem, because I did find that part of the slow aspects of this version of MC remained, but I did get it to finally export to html (after it crashed once). At least it didn't pop an out of memory error.

I'm not very sharp when it comes to a lot of extensions that exist, but I'm wondering if csv = css? The reason I ask is because one of the files produced in the html export is css.
 
No - completely different animals - css stands for Cascading Style sheets which is a mechanism for specifying styles and formats on web pages; csv is an abbreviation for Comma Separated Values which is a format for storing data which may then be viewed in a spreadsheet (amongst other apps). (I'm sure you'll find all of that very edifying!
 
I would be edified, if I understood how to apply that knowledge to practice. If MC actually does use csv, it must be within one of the export formats shown in the screenshot...maybe the text version, because I do remember a lot of commas in it. However, even if that is so, the abbreviated data would be useless even if some other program could import it.
 
As I mentioned, csv is an industry standard, establishing a common format via which applications may exchange data. I would expect most apps to be able to handle data in csv format. Try running the export as text and look to see what file type it generates. If, as you say it has bits of data with loads of commas separating them it is likely to be csv.
 
No, the text format produces a file with the .txt extension, so it must not have anything to do with csv. We rule out .txt and .html, that only leaves xml, iPod Notes, CLZ Mobile Movie Application and Palm/Pocket PC (List Pro).

I don't know anything about those latter types, but somehow they don't sound anything like csv.
 
Quite right - none of them are related to csv and that is probably the most appropriate format to consider for transferring data so if there is no sign of export to csv from any ot the versions of the software maybe you should raise the issue with the producers.
 
I included a link to this thread in my last question to them earlier today, so hopefully they will have seen this question and respond to it, either here or by private email. If they don't then I will ask them a little later.
 
More I think about it the more I am becoming convinced that you have hit a limit in the software.
 
I've about arrived at the same conclusion. The only explanation for their claim that I'm among such a minuscule number of people having a problem like this, can only be that not that many people have large collections, or the claim is without foundation. The only reason that I am still hanging on to it, is because that I had no problems until upgrading to 9.1. Of course that could be just a coincidence, but I've never given coincidences much credence, and I don't see a path out of it that I want to walk.
 
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May be a combination of occurrences - upgrade having less space for cache/indexing etc at the same time as your database is growing. If you can resolve the csv question I'd start looking at how well the data transfers to other apps. You will probably need to experiment a bit to find optimum data transfer. I don't know if the software handles its own databasing structures or if it might be based on a commercial product in which the database itself may be accessible and open to manipulation.
 
I've received several responses from tech since my last post, but all that they have done so far is to pump me for information, with no real solutions offered. However they did answer the question regarding csv that I found curious. This is what they said:

With regards to exporting to csv, csv (comma seperated values) is just a text file. Click File > Export to Text to export to csv.

I still don't think that a txt file is = to a csv one, but even if it were, I would think that the data would have to be listed in a particular order for it to be importable in any other program. With this type of export, the users determines (to a limited extent) what data is to be included on each videos line. Since this would create a file with variable data patterns, of course I'm no programmer, but I don't see how any other program could determine how to deal with it?
 
A csv file is basically a file of text with each data field being delimited by a comma. The layout is fixed so each record comprises a specific number of fields, always in the same order and where no field contains data it just has a comma. For instance, if you had a movie record, holding title, type, year, director and format but only the title and director are recorded if would look like:

title,,,director,,

When data is exported you need to identify the fields and the order in which they are stored to be able to specify the input to the new software. So it may well be that your export to a txt file is actually exporting them in comma separated form but just saving them with a file extension of csv. Try just changing the file extension from txt to csv. If you have any spreadsheet software on your system it should then open the exported file in a spreadsheet format.
 
I kind of understand what a spreadsheet is, but have never used any. My MS Office 2007 does have Access and Excel, which should I try?
 
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