Proxy Path Searching

In CatDV 10.0.6 and later the path mapping has been optimised to make playback faster. CatDV will no longer perform less efficient intermediate “wildcard” searches unless a new option is ticked on the Media Search Paths page.

For example:

with a path mapping of * => /Volumes/CatDVProxies

and a media file of /Volumes/Media/Project/File1.mov.

The expected location of the proxy file is at /Volumes/CatDVProxies/Volumes/Media/Project/File1.mov (or .mp4).

This is where CatDV would create a proxy, and the only place it will look.

In versions previous to 10.0.6 CatDV would also have looked at /Volumes/CatDVProxies/Media/Project/File1.mov, /Volumes/CatDVProxies/Project/File1.mov and /Volumes/CatDVProxies/File1.mov, so if the proxy file is there for some reason it will no longer work unless you check the option.

Rather than simply checking that box whenever proxies no longer work,, it is worth spending a bit of time working out what is going on and why, and trying to solve the root cause. This will make CatDV more responsive.

For example, if the worker is creating proxies at /Volumes/CatDVProxies/Project/File1.mov because you have a watch folder on /Volumes/Media then that’s fine but means you should change the path mapping in CatDV so it says /Volumes/Media => /Volumes/CatDVProxies rather than * => /Volumes/CatDVProxies.

A more complicated example might be if you changed the worker script half way through and some files are in one location and some in another, and you’re relying on CatDV searching all the locations to find the file. If so then it might be worth going in to the proxy folder and manually moving any old files so they’re in the new “correct” location, or setting up two path mappings.

This change means the CatDV desktop clients now behave in the same way as the Web Clients, it was introduced to improve proxy search times particularly on Windows platforms.

Last updated – August 2013