Cause of Itunes 7.6.0.29 freezes on Windows - .mpeg updates

Question

Short version - itunes is nuts, and is digging through your videos while you're trying to listen to music. Take all video (including video podcasts) out of your iTunes library, and return to normal. Save it somewhere and put it back in whenever they issue a patch.
Long version:
I have a large collection of music and video on iTunes (14k items, 60GB), and ever since upgrading to the latest Itunes I've noticed I can start playing a song, but then the UI will freeze for 10-15 seconds once it's about 8-9 second into playing the song - the sound continues, but the interface becomes unresponsive. Looking at the other threads here, sounds like I'm not the only one with the problem.
Using Process Explorer from Systeminternals, I noticed this freeze corresponds to a huge spike in IO from itunes.exe at that time. Purely guessing, but it seems like the UI/event loop thread is blocking doing some sort of disk access, while the thread playing the music continues.
Using Process Monitor (again from sysinternals), I monitored what exactly Itunes.exe was doing at this time. It is going through every MPEG file in the iTunes library, opening it, querying data about it, and apparently in some cases, reading it in completely. This is while playing an unrelated sound file. This clearly seems to be due to a bug - there doesn't seem to be any immediate need to do this.
Removing all the videos from my iTunes library brought things back to normal. Hardly ideal, but way, way better than the way it was.

Answer 1

Hi Bemis,
Yep, I spotted this a couple of days back - I'm running Mac OS, but it's the same deal with the MPEG files (the Apple-supplied Activity Monitor does a good job with respect to examining individual programmes, threads or even processes).
However, I would like to refine your observation a little: I think it has to do with some format(s) of MUXED MPGs, since with non-muxed MPGs or movies of other formats, the files are updated (somehow, with some information, whatever it is), and then not checked again. Specifically, only the movies in my library from a SONY camera (muxed MPEG1 files) are causing the problem - countless other files with various formats/containers are checked and updated just once, in the background, and don't cause a problem.
I am guessing it has something to do with the new Apple movie service, maybe looking for 'out of date' rental files, so as to delete them, and marking (or, in the case of the MPGs which are repeatedly checked, trying to mark) them as non-rental films.
Apple (or an Apple employee, to be precise) actually FINALLY reacted with the following post (see the end of the locked thread):
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6426729
Pretty lame, really - I mean, there are better ways of finding MPG files than clicking 'info' on individual files, particularly if you have 100's or even 1000's of video files. And even if this is a temporary solution, it's pathetic that there is not even a word about an update to solve it permanently and properly, so that iTunes can carry on being used as a central media library without exceptions.
But here's hoping The one (vaguely) bright light is that Apple at least FINALLY reacted on a semi-official basis, instead of blaming the individual computers, which shows that they do really keep at least a bit of an eye on these discussions.