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Anonymous User
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Now TV Player - High CPU usage on OSX

I recently downloaded the NowTV Player App to watch shows on my Mac (had previously been using the SilverLight player in Safari). My Mac Book is a 2013 Unibody MacBook Pro. With an Intel Retina GPU.

 

Watching programs on it seems to send my laptop in to overdrive! The fans spin up and it gets really hot. When the Player is focussed (the window I'm looking at), CPU usage jumps up to anywhere from 50-90% with nothing much else in the background. Minimizing it or looking at another window the usage will drop down again. Looking at the Activity Monitor on my Mac, I see "CiscoVideoGuard" as taking up most of that usage, which I guess it the DRM being used. It also uses considerable amount of energy which I suspect will have an impact on my battery life watching it for more than a couple episodes at a time.

 

Does anyone have any experience with this? It makes late night watching without headphones difficult as the fans are spinning up so high and I need to raise the volume to compensate!

 

Thanks

 

21 REPLIES 21
Anonymous User
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I just signed up tonight, the box and broadband aren't due till the 20th but already thinking of cancelling.

 

That app is unusable on macos. Agree this might not be drm and I'm thinking either a poorly written app or the runtime itself, I think someone else mentioned decoders. Either way my fan is spinning playing a video within seconds. Hi cpu utilisation and time 30-60% cpu, when it goes into the background as I type this it goes down.

 

I see someone else say it's a silverlight app? Haven't looked at it yet but I guessed it was with the window that opened... I've always found streaming via silverlight unusable. I'm a software engineer and haven't done any dotnet dev in years but any players I've had to use as a customer for streaming which were silverlight, were bad on both win, ubuntu and macos. 

If I have the patience I'll try find any logs on kernel tasks but it's the same videoguard process others complaining about and it might be quicker and easier for me to cancel the order, only have macs in the house (I ordered the nowtv+ box too).

 

This is a few years older mac pro but a powerful one and should handle video easily

 

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013)

2.7 GHz Intel Core i7

16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB

 

 

Anonymous User
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After checking a few things it made sense to switch to the dedicated gpu and turn off automatic graphics switching. It worked for my mac anyway https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202043

 

 

Anonymous User
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Hi, I recently installed the NowTV player having rejoined after an absence of a year or so.  I use a Macbook and noticed immediately I started to watch something that the cpu usage went through the roof and my Macbook got very hot.  The cpu fan was working the whole time I was watching.  Having searched through your forums I found this thread from early January 2017 with a post at the end saying you were working to fix this issue.  Since I only installed the NowTV player last week, I'm assuming there hasn't been a fix made available yet.  I would be grateful for an update on when this will be fixed.

Anonymous User
Not applicable

I'm also seeing extremely high using the Now TV Player app on a Mid-2014 Macbook Pro (2.5GHz i7) running macOS Sierra 10.12.5.  The CiscoVideoGuard process uses 105% CPU (more than a whole CPU) to run fullscreen, which starts the noisy macbook fan going, causes the laptop to run very hot, and chews through battery in no time, meaning it's not viable to use unless the laptop is plugged into the mains.

 

As stated elsewhere, other providers do not have this problem, so it is not fundamental to the problem of streaming DRM protected video, indeed Now TV does not chew battery on an iPhone, which is a much less powerful device.

 

+1 for resolution of this issue ASAP.

Anonymous User
Not applicable

So when will the MAC app get fixed so that it's usable on mac laptops? (high CPU usage is not acceptable, as others have stated).

 

Now that I can no longer apparently get silverlight working with nowTV... really this is quite critical.

Anonymous User
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I'm having the same problem on Windows 10. My laptop is a couple of years old but it's still an Intel i5 and even with virtually everything closed except NowTV it's pretty much unwatchable. I've had no problems with Amazon, iPlayer or Netflix. 

Anonymous User
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Same here, i7 running windows 10. the sky go player uses 4 cpu  processes + cicsovideoGuard. Drains the battery in 30mins!

Anonymous User
Not applicable

I'm using Windows with an i5.  This may be basic stuff that you already know, but someone here mentioned Silverlight.  So I'm watching Now TV using Internet Explorer 11 (which uses Silverlight instead of ciscovideoguardmonitor.exe) - CPU usage is lower and sound and video run smoothly.  It's a good workaround for me.

Anonymous User
Not applicable

Thanks, I'll try that as I too am having horrific 'jet plane' noisy fan problems on my windows 10 laptop with I5 processors. The picture quality changes often. Not best pleased.

Anonymous User
Not applicable

Same here, NOWTV is currently unusable for me on my Mac.  It gets very very hot, fans go full, CPU is high (Cisco Video Guard seems to be the culprit) and power usage is very high.  For the safety of my machine I don't think it is suitable to use, cancelling my subscription as a result for the Entertianment package.  Luckily the movie pass is still usable on my BT set top box app.  Tried on another mac to make sure it wasn't just my machine and same result. 

 

Please fix this Now TV or at least investigate and acknowledge the problem!