Question

This query pulls from two separate tables. The video_thumb_chosen has a thumbcolumn that needs where the mode value needs to be selected.

$query = "SELECT DISTINCT videos.VIDEOID, 
                          videos.title,
                          (
                           select video_thumb_chosen.thumb
                           from video_thumb_chosen
                           where video_thumb_chosen.videoid = videos.VIDEOID 
                           group by video_thumb_chosen.thumb
                           order by count(video_thumb_chosen.thumb) desc limit 1 
                          ) as thumb, 
                          videos.rating, 
                          videos.runtime, 
                          videos.viewcount, 
                          videos.public, 
                          videos.time_added, 
                          videos.HD 
          FROM videos,video_thumb_chosen 
          WHERE videos.active='1' 
             && videos.tube=0  
             && videos.categories <> 7 
          ORDER BY videos.last_viewed desc limit $config[max_viewing_now]"; 

Answer 1

Removing the cross join in the from clause would help:

FROM videos

You are not using video_thumb_chosen in the outer query, so there is no reason to include it.

There may be other optimizations as well.

Given what you are doing in MySQL, that will probably fix the problem. Here is the query:

SELECT videos.VIDEOID, videos.title,
      (select video_thumb_chosen.thumb
       from video_thumb_chosen
       where video_thumb_chosen.videoid = videos.VIDEOID
       group by video_thumb_chosen.thumb
       order by count(video_thumb_chosen.thumb) desc limit 1
      ) as thumb,
      videos.rating, videos.runtime, videos.viewcount, videos.public, videos.time_added, videos.HD
FROM videos
where  videos.active='1' && videos.tube=0  && videos.categories <> 7
ORDER BY videos.last_viewed
desc limit $config[max_viewing_now]";