For several months, I’d been having a problem with my Macbook where the fan ran around 6000 rpm constantly and the battery life was about a third of what it should be. I tried everything — physically cleaning out any visible dust or debris from the vents, zapping the PRAM, looking for stray user processes that might be using the CPU constantly — but nothing seemed to consistently work. Rebooting helped for a short period, but after a few minutes, the fan came back on.
SealedMedia using nearly 100% of my processor
Finally, I gave up and chalked up the battery problems to an older (about 1.5 years) computer and the fan problems to poor heat management in my laptop. It wasn’t the perfect Apple experience that Steve Jobs maybe have liked, especially with a noisy fan running constantly, but it worked.
One day, I was poking through my process viewer, and changed the filter to show ‘All Processes’. Lo and behold, I noticed that one process was taking up 97% of my processor. Since at that time I was only browsing the web with Safari, this was entirely unexpected. After a bit of Googling, I found out that the process, titled ‘SealedMedia Righ’ belonged to some sort of DRM installed on my computer. Whether it came with the system somehow or was installed with a program remains a mystery, but what I do know is the following:
- It was started by launchd, which is a system process kicked off by the kernel
- Killing it immediately brings the processor usage back to normal, the fan almost immediately from 6000 rpm to under 2000 rpm, and the battery life moves to over 3 hours from about 1hr on a full charge
- It doesn’t come back (that I’ve noticed) after I kill it
- It does come back a short time after a reboot.
- Killing it doesn’t seem to have any undesired effects whatsoever
- I’m running OSX 10.4, not sure if its unique to this version or not
Given that 100% processor usage generates a lot of heat, which is particularly bad for the expensive battery and hardware inside, this malware DRM app is destroying my computer. Googling for a while didn’t turn up much to solve the problem, so I’m asking users — anyone else have any more information about this program, what it does, how it got there, or how to stop it?
SealedMedia killed, CPU usage back to normal.
Unfortunately, while I’ve come to expect nasty DRM from Apple, this takes the cake because ultimately it will greatly reduce the life of my laptop.
7 comments ↓
Try Lingon (http://tuppis.com/lingon/). You should be able to dig up where the .plist being used by launchd is located, and delete that file.
Lingon will show you all the agents being launched by launchd. Clicking on that agent will give you the name (which you can search for) and the command the agent uses to launch the SealedMedia app. That command will also tell you where the app is located, so you can delete it as well, and possibly get a clue as to where you picked it up from. You may also find a list of keys that will give you a clue as to which media file you downloaded.
I haven’t heard about SealedMedia in years — there was a big todo when Apple included the capability of it in QuickTime, since SealedMedia was popular for protecting certain types of video then. It’s possible that the app that’s causing problems is part of QuickTime and may have become corrupted. In that case, you should probably re-install QuickTime.
I should have checked this before, but I didn’t see any .plists for SealedMedia on my system, so it is probably something you downloaded yourself, in order to view a media file. Which means you can delete it without too much trouble.
I’m extremely embarrassed for you that it took “several months” before you resolved this issue. Download MenuMeters and activate Display CPU.. anytime it is maxed out you’ll be able to jump straight into Activity Monitor to see what processes are running amok.
@deefa
you don’t have to be an asshat about how long it took the blogger to find his/her problem. At least s/he was nice enough to share this info with others.
We don’t all get to sit around Mom’s basement drinking Diet Coke and eating chips while playing Warcraft all day.
and oh yeah, thanks for the tip on MenuMeters for OS X
on Linux this is a standard thing to have going
Hi, cool site, good writing
Ever figure this out? I found the installer on the Oracle site, and you can uninstall everything from the uninstaller.
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/content-management/index_irm_desktop.html
Haven’t seen that yet – just gave it a shot. Thanks!
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