Apologies in advance for any incorrect assumptions; I’m a novice user, introduced to KDE via SteamOS on my Steam Deck, using its “Desktop Mode.” This also involves a behavior change that came with the recent SteamOS update, but the issue I’m having is specific to Dolphin so I thought it might help to ask about it here. (I’ve also asked about this in forums specific to SteamOS and the Steam Deck, but haven’t yet found much help)
The settings for generating previews/thumbnails, in Dolphin, are split between local and remote, with different handling. By default, previews are generated for local files of any size, but only for remote files under 10mb. As far as I can tell, this is because Dolphin uses a different behavior with “remote” files; it seems to think it needs to download the entire file locally before it can generate a preview. It also doesn’t seem to cache the previews it generates, so every time I navigate to a remote folder in a new session it has to start fresh with generating previews.
I’ve got a NAS, shared via SMB, with a lot of media files on it, including some fairly large video files. If I change the “10mb” default to several GB, Dolphin will generate previews for the video files; but it utterly saturates my connection bandwidth in the process. If I navigate to a folder with a lot of large video files, and then open one in VLC, the playback stutters and buffers as Dolphin is downloading all those large files in the background.
Previous to the recent SteamOS update (a few weeks ago?), I was able to get around this by mounting the NAS to a local folder with a line in the fstab file (using this Reddit post as a guide).
That not only meant I wouldn’t have to manually connect to the NAS in each session, it also had meant that Dolphin was treating the NAS folders as “local” instead of “remote.” Which worked fine! When browsing those folders, previews were generated quickly, without pulling the entirety of each file off the NAS, and it seemed like previews were also being cached.
As of the recent SteamOS update, that mounting method is no longer working to get Dolphin to treat the NAS folders as if they were local.
Is there any way I can get the previous behavior back, and have Dolphin treat the NAS folders as local instead of remote? Some advanced setting in Dolphin? Different mounting method for the NAS? Different parameters in the fstab line? Different protocol (instead of SMB) for connecting to the NAS?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. The files on my NAS are a bit of a mess, and not all of them are named very clearly, so the previews/thumbnails had been very useful, and I’d really like to get them back, working the way they had been a few weeks ago.