Comments on: What is MediaAgent.exe ?

By: Antony

Antony — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 04:08:06 +0000

To gr8grfx and everyone, you CAN control this software if u like.
MediaAgent.exe is an auto start service: go to admin tools/services and select “OpenCASE Media Agent”. Right click, change properties to manual start and also in the recovery tab change to “take no action” in case of service failure.
Having done the above you can safely kill both mediaagent.exe and NBCPandoRest.exe in Task Mgr and they will not restart.
Separately, “OpenCASE Media Agent” CAN also be deselected in msconfig on the services tab.

By: gr8grfx

gr8grfx — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 21:51:32 +0000

That’s the key! It eats up Bandwidth while I’m trying to download other stuff, and I end up with corrupted downloads. I’ve uninstalled the NBC player, but both NBCPandoREST.exe and MediaAgent.exe auto run again, even after I kill the processes in TaskManager. There is no offer for the software to be disabled, and it cannot be accessed via msconfig.exe. Technically, this makes these two programs trojans. Much like the “bonjour” service. You know, big companies are hiding behind a EULA claiming that a click of a mouse button counts as a legal document. It doesn’t, but most lawyers aren’t interested in tearing them up in court. This system isn’t necessary for Fox, ABC, or Fancast to stream HD video. Their stuff plays just fine on my system. I guess I’ll just quit watching NBC as much as I used to. Earl isn’t even in HD most of the time, and that’s the main show I watch.
I own my computer. I built it. I paid for it and I put the O.S. and all the programs on it. NBC does not. The fact that I even allowed them the privilege to put their crappy ASP script run LOGOesque proggie on my system should make them feel honored. They should show some respect, especially since I could spend my time doing something other than watching T.V. and fighting bad programming. I think I’ll write letters to the advertisers that pay them. After all, that’s what T.V. is really about, not entertainment.

By: Justin

Justin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 05:15:56 +0000

Since this showed up on the first page Google search for NBCPandoRest.exe, I wanted to throw a quick note in here about the (related) NBCPandoRest.exe process. If left to itself, it will max out your internet connection trying to upload video content to peers (kind of like NBC’s demented version of p2p), and I couldn’t find a way to slow it down. Kill in task manager, and uninstall NBC direct while you’re at it.

By: Vince

Vince — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 06:06:37 +0000

If you have uninstalled NBC Direct, you still need to uninstall the Media Agent. Just scroll through the program list until you find the OpenCase Media Agent. GET RID OF IT. Anyone wonder why it’s eating CPU cycles? It’s port scanning. I fired up wireshark and it’s scanning incremented ports looking for an open port. Here’s the kicker, I already had the NBCDirect software uninstalled. Make sure you get both. This is just terrible software and NBC should be ashamed of themselves.

By: Driveby Commenter

Driveby Commenter — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:52:00 +0000

I recently installed NBCDirect and thanks to the install also discovered that NBCPandoREST.exe is running, sucking up 23Mb of RAM, in addition to MediaAgent.exe’s 30Mb. I’m not sure if it is because I run Firefox exclusively, but automagic downloads never worked for me unless I launched NBCDirect.

FWIW, because the auto-download didn’t work as expected, I used msconfig > services and turned off both services. Neither has spawned on me at restart or in use of my PC. However, note that I’ve not run NBCDirect since. Maybe that resets msconfig somehow?

@Ryan Hollis: I see Hulu has vastly improved since launch and must give it another chance.

By: Godzirra

Godzirra — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:15:03 +0000

RE: NBC Direct

I’ll tell you one thing, if I designed this shitty of an application (wastes memory and, oh, by the way also doesn’t work worth a damn), I sure as hell wouldn’t brag about it, eh?

By: Ryan Hollis

Ryan Hollis — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:34:17 +0000

i recently got a different firewall and everytime i turn on my pc it asks do i want to allow OpenCASE Media Agent to access the internet
i installed that NBC thing along time ago and unstalled it, but i guess this thing was separate
btw go to hulu.com, they have all the shows on NBC and from most channels on there the same day that they air, and has a lot less commercials than TV

By: Kelt

Kelt — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:11:31 +0000

I wanted to watch Scrubs and Heroes since I missed them on live TV. So I went to view it online but for some reason the fullscreen is really half-screen. I tried 3 different browsers, Chrome, IE7 and Firefox 2.

I installed NBC Direct, realized it sucked balls and uninstalled it. Then I noticed later that same week that webpages failed to load, connections would drop off and that I have a nice load on my system and there is this interesting process running called MediaAgent.exe.

I should have known better to install NBC Direct on anything but a throw away test virtual machine. I don’t know what kind of crappy software developers they employ at NBC but I’ve written prototypes better than NBC Direct. Don’t install it, period.

By: kmonti

kmonti — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:54:19 +0000

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?

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:48:01 +0000

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?)

By: Watch TV shows for FREE on your computer | Global Toad News

Watch TV shows for FREE on your computer | Global Toad News — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:47:54 +0000

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

By: rehdwolfe

rehdwolfe — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 15:26:17 +0000

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.

By: D Bradley

D Bradley — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:31:09 +0000

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.

By: SavNout

SavNout — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 07:05:21 +0000

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!

By: Martin

Martin — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 22:29:58 +0000

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

By: christina

christina — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 22:02:35 +0000

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!

By: Martin

Martin — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 15:19:57 +0000

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

By: taixi

taixi — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 14:54:13 +0000

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!

By: Erik

Erik — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 02:11:53 +0000

Bu-bye NBC Direct
Hello Veoh!

ty greatly M.Keezay

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:45:05 +0000

Service Disabled - OpenCASE Media Agent - Sorry.