What is MediaAgent.exe ?

With Netflix around, I don’t find it particularly urgent to install spyware from various media companies like NBC or Sony. I just install DVDFab Decryptor.

it’s too bad Netflix doesn’t send you shows that have just been aired.

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Seriously!! Just installed NBC DirectDownload and my whole computer started acting like it was from 1988 !!! Not to mention it wouldnt even download the shows.. Just took whole thing off my computer, and voila! Can actually stream video again, and am not CONSTANTLY using 100% CPU!!! Losers.

[...] machine — even when NBC Direct wasn’t running. Joe wasn’t alone. Martin over at ghacks.net noted the Media Agent, also installed through NBC Direct, was nabbing 30 MB of his [...]

yeah this thing sucks. The MediaAgent software also breaks some other things too. If you have Microsoft ActiveSync installed on a Windows Media Center XP machine, this stupid thing breaks activesync AND media center. It took me forever to figure out it was MediaAgent that was doing it too.

With today’s computers having often more than a gig of RAM, are you really complaining about a download manager (effectively what the Media Agent is) taking a mere 30MB’s?

After days of trying to figure out what happened to Microsoft ActiveSync 4.5 on my machine, I discovered that OpenCase Media (which is installed along with NBC Direct) was the culprit. OpenCase Media will not allow ActiveSync to open and hence, I could not sync my Palm Treo 700W.

I have since removed NBC Direct and all of its components and all is well (well, as good as Windows gets).

I believe that the Showtime Player also installs OpenCase Media.

I figured this was the culprit, I noticed this process just now too. Thanks for posting this.

Also re: “it’s too bad Netflix doesn’t send you shows that have just been aired.”

I noticed Netflix has the ability to play the newest Heros episodes on Wednesdays - higher quality than the NBC direct download tool too. Of course, you need XP SP2, IE7, windows media player 9, and probably some other installed DRM agents like NBC’s player uses.

Rossman - You don’t get it. It’s not even being run. You can’t just allow phantom processes sit there and eat memory. What if you had 10 processes eating up 30MB each? That becomes more significant, and it just needs to be accounted for. If it’s not something you need, get rid of it. Security holes need to be plugged, who knows what this thing does really? Why let it run?

Edit: I see now Rossman, you worked for NBC on this product. No wonder you are all about it - I didn’t think “meomory hog” fanboys existed, but now it’s coming together. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s good to know people’s motivations.

“As most of you probably don’t know, I was the front-end/UI developer behind the flash player that NBC ended up using for their beta NBC Direct service.”

@John:

Actually dude, I totally get it.

Say it’s 2am, you’re in bed, but NBC releases a new episode of Heroes. In this case by the time you get up the download manager would have the episode ready and waiting for you.

They just made a choice of how they wanted their content delivered:

Option 1:
You would choose not to have that service running (to save what is a small amount of memory in todays PCs), and to have to run their player application every time you want to get something, wait for it to download, then watch it

Option 2: Whereas they chose to have a small service running which will automatically download the content that you subscribe to, the moment that it’s available. When you start the player, the shows you wanted to see are already downloaded and watchable. Sounds kinda convenient…

Frankly, I don’t know which option is better, but both of them have their merits for sure. It doesn’t have anything to do with being a “memory hog fanboy” (wtf? did you seriously say that?) either, my PC is godly enough that 30megs of RAM isn’t a big deal. I can’t even run the software up here in Canada anyways, so the point is moot from that perspective.

And for the record: I don’t work for that company anymore, and am not speaking in any official capacity for them; these opinions are strictly my own.

I’m with you Rossman. I’m mainly pointing out that we don’t know really what it does. I’d wager it does more than just grab shows for me automagically. I would surely rather know that the NBC direct downloader was in my system tray telling me “Hey, I’ll grab new videos when you’re away”. I’m fine with that, just give me the option to turn it off if I don’t want it either.

I know the memory hog fanboy sounded ridiculous, I had a hard time coining that too, but that’s why I was initially confused by your post. I can’t imagine anyone is okay with processes showing up with little announcement and doing unknown things - regardless of utilization of memory. The memory just adds insult. Also I never would have noticed it if it weren’t so big. My PC is finally Godly enough to run all the requisite software for this direct downloader application, but historically I haven’t had much RAM so it hurts even more.

Let’s say you had $2,000 in the bank, and they charged you a $30 service fee. You ask the bank why, and they tell you it’s so you can get your money faster. Surely you’d complain. If you had a few million in the bank, maybe that would be legitimate since large transfers take time and some sort of overhead is involved (not that putting millions in the bank is smart, but it does put it in perspective).

I know you aren’t really responding as a contractor of NBC’s website - I was just gaining insight into your views. For me, not being an application developer, I am biased toward less memory utilization. For someone like you, you probably focus more on the advantages those applications give you. Again, use the memory, if I know what it is. If it’s some unknown process name, stay small so you are off the radar.

For the record: I just uninstalled the downloader as killing the service did not get rid of it, it keeps spawning.

p.s. - I watched Heroes on Netflix and the quality rocks, it only takes a few seconds to buffer, no commercials, and it didn’t need to download overnight with a vampire process. (This week rocked too!). I’m not a serious enough TV-watcher to need to get a fix on the road or anything away from my network connection, so that may be a restriction others can’t deal with. I do it because I don’t use a TV for anything besides playing DVDs (no cable) and I understand that probably isn’t the reason people want to watch episodes online.

Hey - I don’t care what friggin shows I can watch when a program causes my computer to go crazy. I hope that people stay away from the NBC Direct Product until this problem with Open Case Media Agent is cleared up.

It caused my computer to become incredibly slow and took forever for me to find the one little process that was screwing everything up - in this case OpenCase Media Agent. Uninstall this little nightmare as soon as you can!

I wouldn’t mind a 30MB process that did only what it was supposed to, stayed in the background, and never took more than 30MB. But since installing the NBC Direct/OpenCASE junkware, I have had daily spikes to 100% CPU–and it was always MediaAgent.exe hogging resources. Since I wasn’t doing anything media related, I killed the process and went on with what I was doing. Finally, today when things locked and MediaAgent.exe was again the culprit, I went searching and found this post near the top of the results. NBC and Open Case are being uninstalled as I type.

There is a program called veohtv-http://www.veoh.com/veohTV/getStarted.html
which gives you access to all the nbc direct content, content from abc and 154 other tv and internet channels. Plus it streams them all so theres no need for downloading and best of all no
media-agent. You will need to register but its free. Video quality is ok, I have a p3 733 mhz
512 mb ram and it works fine on my system. And unlike nbcdirect you can use it from Canada.
Hope this helps anyone who wants to watch nbc’s shows without using direct.

Why would they need to install a passive process on your system for this? I don’t want anything running in the background, without my knowledge. This is disappointing for NBC.

Just to let people know - after I installed NBC Direct, my Microsoft ActiveSync stopped working. That is the only service that I disabled and ActiveSync works now.

Service Disabled - OpenCASE Media Agent - Sorry.

Bu-bye NBC Direct
Hello Veoh!

ty greatly M.Keezay

hello all, I unfortunately was foolish enough to install NBC Direct and as soon as I tried to watch one show I realized it was not worth it; so I’ve been uninstalling all the crap that comes with NBC Direct. BUT, sadly for me, OpenCASE Media Agent won’t uninstall — every time I try to remove the program I get the following error msg:

InstallUtilLib.dll: Unknown error.

And the uninstall fails.
Has anyone else had this problem? Advice?

Thanks!

Taixi that sounds like trouble. I would make NBC responsible and ask them for an solution. Try this hotfix, maybe it helps. Let me know.

http://support.installshield.com/kb/view.asp?articleid=Q111934

Hi! I too downloaded NBC direct last night and have encountered problems. So I have deleted all programs downloaded.

However, I am unable to delete OpenCASE because it states “Cannot delete AdvertisingComponent.ddl Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and the file is currently not in use”. So the files deletion was cancelled.

At the time, I didnt have any other program running. Any advice? Thank you!

Christina use this tool http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/

God you guys really get off track when talking problem solutions! I too got this damn OpenCase from downloading Fantastic4 from Wal-Mart! (They offered a free download of the movie when you bought the DVD) Wal-Mart shut the service down..I uninstalled the Wal-Mart Video Download Manager but it left this service stilled installed! I disabled it, then I went into my c:program files and erased the OpenCASE folder…then did a registry Search for OpenCASE and deleted all registry enrtries with OpenCASE and now the service is gone!

Damn poor uninstallers Wal-Mart downloader used, left this damn OpenCASE folder still there!

Tried using it under Vista and no go, so uninstalled the NBC downloader. I figured I was done. I wouldn’t have noticed anything except I kept getting asked if I wanted to let OpenCase Media Agent talk to the Internet. I’m sure it was a typical program goof of not incorporating some third party uninstaller as part of theirs, but it gives the appearance of maybe leaving some spyware behind since it’s still phoning home. A search through installed programs showed OpenCase, so I uninstalled it. Look like it removed it. The program files directory, at least, is not there.

There’s really no reason to have such a program stay in memory. In reality Windows will eventually swap it out anyway if it needs. But if the polling interval is not very small, I’d rather see them use the scheduling service. Launch a small application that phones home. This can be quite small and then launches something more if there’s more to be done.

The problem with applications like OpenCase is that they often use huge frameworks like MFC, .Net, Java that needlessly take up large amounts of RAM when a small light app would have been much better. Everyone has the mentality that hey, users’ computers have tons of RAM lets not worry about memory consumption. But hey, I don’t run just one application I’m often running several. If they all take that attitude my system performance WILL suffer.

I use my computer to do my job. I watch tv to not do my job. Any process that puts my computer and job at risk shall go. Period.

Even though computers have lots of memory these days the Windows operating system doesn’t use it all very effectively so yeah, that 30mb is significant especially if its doing nothing for me.

[...] any case, I ran across this page that had problems with MediaAgent.exe running at 100% (and what reason does it have to be [...]

I installed NBC Direct and it caused havoc with Microsoft ActiveSync so I unistalled it back in January. Does anyone know if the newer versions of NBC Direct has fixed this (it is now May 1?)

Nick …

NBC still has not fixed this, as I have just discovered. I have read several threads with several solutions … not sure what I need to do. Uninstalled NBC Direct crap and the OpenCase, reinstalled ActiveSync, but still no dice. Which hotfix, free program, etc., should I try now?