Deleting Melytech folder

I’m actively using Shotcut for almost 2 years now. I usually stage the MLT file along with audio/video sources and the resulting video file in a separate huge space. Reconstructing any previous video has never been a problem.

Checking disk drive space of my Ubuntu workstation, I have noticed the existence of folder ~/.cache/Meltytech/Shotcut/qmlcache. It’s taking 2 GB and contains 128084 files. Some are from around the first time I used Shotcut.

What’s the purpose of keeping cache files so long?
Does Shotcut or any of its underlying components have some sort of garbage collector or automatic cache cleaner?
Would deleting any of Meltytech/Shotcut/qmlcache, Meltytech/Shotcut or Meltytech folders be safe?

Regards

gigabytes
WOW… mine also contains 2 years old files. But the folder only weights 38 megs.
You’re not kidding when you say you’re actively using Shotcut :slight_smile:

I’m also curious to know if we can safely delete those files.

Wow!. What a difference :smiley: !

The problem about 128 thousand files is that such a list became hard to use, even typing all sorts of “ls” commands from a terminal window. I haven’t found any “please clean my room” button, and that’s why I asked … before going ahead and deleting files older than say 6 months or so.

My videos are 45 min to 1 hour long. They are made of 10 to 20 performances with filters (fade, scale, moving texts, etc.) Each one of those performances have been also assembled with Shotcut, out of a real recording along with its noise suppressed variant (from Audaticy). So each video may have 20 MLT projects.

I don’t know. Maybe that’s causing the huge number of file.

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This cache is a part of Qt UI library, and Shotcut does not manage it:

It seems we could disable it, but I do not want to do that. Basically, we developers did not anticipate the growth of this and are caught unaware that may need to manage it. Great, thanks. :disappointed:

Yes, you can safely delete files in here, but you might need to do it while Shotcut is not running.

No, that is not the cause. The cause is the number of updates to Shotcut code and frequency with which you run Shotcut and use various filters.

I made a change for the next version to only keep the 5000 most recent items in the cache. That reduced the cache on my Linux machine from 858M to 50M.

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Thank you very much.

Yes, I use lots of audio and video filters, some of them are key framed. Quite often, there are 2 audio tracks and 3 video tracks. All that together could be the original cause, I see.

The new limit seems reasonable to me.

Hello,
Following your question, I went, out of curiosity, to see the Melytech file.
I looked at the “Thumbnails” file and to my surprise I have 5000 images many of them are in multiple copies.
What should be done with them to erase or keep them?
What is the use of this file?
Thank you for your opinions.
Regards.

This is explained in Dan’s replies above. In reply 4 he says:

Where is this file on OS X please?

Thank you Elusien for your anwser, is it as well for qmlcache ?

~/Library/Caches/Meltytech/Shotcut/qmlcache

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