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[AoXoMoXoA]

I have noticed some icon appearing in my system tray at times, but when I try to hover my cursor to get the program name the icon instantly vanishes, leaving me perplexed and frustrated.

I have tried to ID it from the Task Manager's Process window, but with no luck.
Coincidentally, there seems to be a system slow-down while this icon is visible. Today I noticed there were 4 or 5 of these icons at once.

I have run virus scans as well as anti-spyware with no results,
Any ideas?
Is there a program that can log what icons appear in the system tray?

These 5 icons are the ones I am questioning. (I wish screen capture could zoom in)



BTW:
I am running Win xp Pro

[coolblue]

They look like Haali(sp?) Media Splitter icons. I think MC uses this decoder for some media types; or if you have one of the large codec packs installed (K-Lite, etc.) some of your files may be routed through it. I don't know why you'd have so many - maybe one per stream?

[glynor]

It is Haali, and it's ending up there because MC uses it when it is creating thumbnails and it doesn't (like many applications) properly close it's Notification Area icon when it is closed in certain ways.  Haali is a splitter that's part of CCCP (and most other codec packs) which allows your system to decode and view many MPEG-4 media types and MKV files.

Nothing to worry about.  The icons are just that, icons.  If you check the running threads in the process on your system, you will see that Haali has properly closed it's thread.  (Haali shows up in Process Explorer as splitter.ax.)  The icons vanish because the system checks the running thread for what to do when you mouseover the icon, and discovers that it's not there anymore (so the icon shouldn't have been there in the first place).

Newer beta versions of Haali close themselves down better (and have an option to disable the annoying popup messages).  I've been running the current beta build of CCCP (2006-10-23) which includes the new Haali splitter and it's somewhat better behaved.  I do still get orphaned Haali and FFDSHOW icons occasionally though...

[AoXoMoXoA]

BINGO!
We have a winner ladies & gentlemen  
The offender is CCCP (no, not the former Soviet Union   )
Combined Community Codec Pack, which contains (guess which?) Haali Media Splitter!

re: Media Center - how does DirectShow interface with MC?
What is it's function?
Advantages/disadvantages?
Should I uninstall it, turn off the audio section of it, or?

It seems to slow my system at times, at least I think this is what was doing it as my system had slowed to a crawl on several occaisions for no apparent reason, when I spotted this/these icons each time.

Suggestions and advice welcome.

[AoXoMoXoA]

Ah glynor, thanks. I hadn't noticed thumbnails building as these icons led me in another direction. That makes sense.
Next question is - how do I "throttle-down" the thumbnailing process so it does not slow my PC as much?
It was very noticable.

p.s. what a relief to know it is not some trojan or something!.


Media Center Registered 12.0.108 -- C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 12\

Microsoft Windows XP  Workstation 5.1 Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
AMD Unknown 2004 MHz MMX / Memory: Total - 1048 MB, Free - 618 MB

Internet Explorer: 6.0.2900.2180 / ComCtl32.dll: 5.82.2900 / Shlwapi.dll: 6.0.2900 / Shell32.dll: 6.0.2900 / wnaspi32.dll: N/A
Ripping /   Drive D: LITE-ON DVDRW SHM-165H6S  Mode:ModeSecure  Type:Auto  Speed:Max
  Digital playback: Yes /  Use YADB: Yes /  Get cover art: Yes /  Calc replay gain: Yes /  Copy volume: 32767
  Eject after ripping: Yes /  Play sound after ripping: No 

Burning /  Drive D: LITE-ON  DVDRW SHM-165H6S   Addr: 3:3:0  Speed:48  MaxSpeed:48  BurnProof:Yes
  Test mode: No /  Eject after writing: Yes /  Direct decoding: Yes /  Write CD-Text: Yes
  Use playback settings: No /

Portable Device Info
  Removed devices:

[glynor]

Definitely not if you want to be able to use the files it's supporting!

Once the threads are closed, any negative performance impact is your imagination.  This can be verified using Process Explorer if you are so inclined.

While MC is running, it does launch multiple "thumbnailing" threads in the background which will use Haali to decode media that it is chosen for.  It is generally considered the best MP4 splitter out there (and the only MKV splitter officially supported).  While MC is actively thumbnailing it will use resources, of course, but not once it's done.  If you uninstalled Haali it would just use some other splitter to decode the files (Quicktime is it's fallback and it certainly doesn't have better performance) and you'd be in the same place with a different icon showing up (assuming the splitter has one).

It would be nice if you could disable the background thumbnailing task in MC for slower machines, but you can't unfortunately (yet I hope).

[glynor]

I'd certainly vote for the ability to:

a) completely disable background thumbnailing in MC (and have it only run when manually initiated).

b) (less important but still) the ability to manually change the "niceness" of the background threads used for this purpose.  I have terrible problems on my machine with MC's DCRAW background process when thumbnailing RAW camera files.

[AoXoMoXoA]

hi Glynor,
I updated the CCCP build and so far so good. We will see.