Problems playing video

motim · 25 Mar 2016

Hello,
As mentioned on a recent thread about "audiodg.exe" eating cpu and memory resources (while playing video), I made a search in the windows system and found six exactly same folders with this "audiodg.exe" file, may be they interfere with each other ?
They are located in C:\windows\winsxs\x86..... I attach here some screenshots of the six folders and the inside of one of them, exactly the same only different dates, can I delete five of them and leave only the latest ?
Answers will be appreciated.
Thanks
Motim

Barman58 · 25 Mar 2016

Do not believe anything that you see in the winsxs folder or sub folders. winsxs is merely a repository for copies of verious system files, they are actually not files at all, they are symbolic links,

if you have two programs that both use variations of a certain DLL or support file but will work with the latest version windows makes two links one imitating each version but both actually using the latest, ( the older version is deleted) as the Symbolic Link is a few bytes rather than the possible megabytes of the DLL file this save space - A properties scan of the winsxs folder may show it's contents to be many Gigabytes whereas in reality it rarely exceeds a few megabytes or even kilobytes.

Warning

Messing with the contents of winsxs can mean you have to perform a complete new install

motim · 26 Mar 2016

Hello Barman58,
Thanks for the answer, but this folder takes more then 12.5 GB of my C: hard disk, and there are lot of doubles and triples of files, so it looks that they are not links at all. I have to find a way to reduce this folder to gain some disk space back.
Thanks
Motim

Barman58 · 26 Mar 2016

I will state again the the winsxs folder is not the size that Windows Explorer reports it as. A symbolic link will show explorer the same file size as the actual size. although it's really only a few kB or more often a few tens of bytes.

Please read this from Microsoft ...

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2795190

Any actual wastage in the folder will be cleaned by the normal windows processes

Manual "cleaning" of the winsxs folder will cause your system to fail

ROG860 · 26 Mar 2016

Motim

I have also been trying to find out why audiodg seems to have something to do with video freezing on my laptop (particularly on youtube when my USB headphones are plugged in).

I have been looking at the audio playback but I now think it could be related to the audio recording. If you want try something, go to the speakers icon and the bring up the recording devices. Disable them all. See if the video crashing problems still occur. This is what I am trying just now.

Problems playing video

Problems playing video

Win sxs folder