Finally got the packJPG plugin working and doesn't seem to crash any more!
Now just need to do some code cleanup etc and release it.
Unfortunately, packJPG decompression is very slow.  My random 3072x2304 "8MP" image takes like 2 seconds to show up.  A random 3648x2736 "10MP" image took around 4 seconds.  I guess most people won't really have >8MP photos around, and seeing that an i7 2600K should be like 2x faster than my Q6600 (possibly more with an overclock), I guess you could get somewhat acceptable results on a good CPU.  The only issue is thumbnail generation - XnView scans the full image for thumbnails, and oddly, although it uses multi-threading, it doesn't appear to be using more than 25% of my CPU - weird - maybe the multi-threading is only used for doing multiple events (eg building thumbnails whilst displaying a preview) as opposed to multi-threaded thumbnail generation.
Speed not helped that much by the fact that it needs to go PJG » JPEG » image.  Maybe there's some way to go PJG » image without going through JPEG, though it seems JPEG decompression at least is fast, thanks to libjpeg-turbo.

Had been spending ages trying to find the issue, which turned out to be some static variables in a different class.  Couldn't get them to be thread local (GCC requires pthreads or something like that to do it) so had to push them to the main class and pass as arguments.  Fortunately it wasn't too difficult.

(This post was last modified: 13/03/2012 02:53 AM by ZiNgA BuRgA.)

As if you could be stuffed doing all that stuff just to compress some images.  How many images do you have anyway?

Like 25GB or something.  packJPG should save around 6GB or so - pretty good for lossless compression (on already compressed content).

Can't really see much other gains I can get from lossless space saving.
Some of Coalbloat's files are taking up a fair bit of space - maybe I'll try searching for smaller versions some time.

(This post was last modified: 13/03/2012 04:03 AM by ZiNgA BuRgA.)

Looks like a 2TB drive fell under the weight of all that compressed stuff and failed.
Urgh, will have to go out and buy a new HDD tomorrow, and hopefully be able to recover all my data.

Funny that external drives are currently cheaper than internal ones.  3TB is like $200, 3TB external can be gotten for $180.
And damn it that good RAID cards cost so much.  Was thinking about hardware RAID, but the cheapest card to support RAID5 (with more than 2 ports) is like $200, and I question how well it handles power failures...  Can get a NAS for that much, and presumably ZFS is better?
Software (Windows at least) and fake RAID sucks.  Guess I'll just ditch RAID altogether and attach the 3TB external, performing periodic backups to it, although I'd much prefer a RAID1/5 setup.

Grabbed a WD Elements external 3TB drive (which seems to have a WD30EZRX).  Works out to be the same price as the internal.
Apparently many people reporting the Hitachi dying after a few months - could be just anecdotal, but the Amazon ratings for it are pretty bad in general.  Seagate apparently is loud.  Samsung don't make a 3TB drive, so stuck with a WD again.

Started up the RAID thing and Intel Matrix Storage immediately tries to rebuild the RAID, with no apparent way of stopping it.  Also can't seem to find an option to break the mirror...
So, was trying to copy whilst the RAID was being rebuilt, for super slow speeds.  RAID failed to rebuild as expected, but it seems that at least the mirroring process has stopped and I can continue to copy, so see how well that goes...

Yo bazz, I heard you came back!

You forgot the maniacal laughing my friend...

pocky Smith selling 2TB external drives for $99.
Damn >_>