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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

The media player is what renders all the little movie thumbnails in Explorer. So it's got hooks in the OS. (Not to mention all the DRM cruft, that's probably down at the driver level.)

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Actually this may not be the case. I was doing some testing recently where I happened to have 32-bit codecs for a video format I was using, but did not have 64-bit codecs. Media player could play the file, but explorer could not thumbnail them. Media player is 32-bit, whereas explorer is 64-bit. After installing 64-bit codecs, the explorer thumbnails worked.

This would suggest that the thumbnailing is not done by media player.

Explorer works like an alternative player when creating the thumbnails, so it can use the same codecs as media player. You could have only the codecs and remove media player, and thumbnails still should work.

There is a 64-bit media player, it's just not the default, maybe due to lack of 3rd-party 64-bit codecs at the time. To make it default: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-w...

The DRM I guess is understandable (if annoying). The thumbnail functionality surely could be done by simply restarting explorer.

explorer is the same program that runs the desktop. They still could get away with just restarting explorer, but that erases your state and makes everything look broke for a few moments.

I don't know why they do it this way, but nautilus is the same way so I guess there is some reason.

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