The VideoLAN Forums

Hello,

My CPU seems to slow down within 30 min to 1 hr after playing video files in VLC media player. The video starts to skip and become blocky with either yellow or green boxes. If I shut down VLC and run other programs on my computer such as Google Chrome, they run extremely slow as well. Then every subsequent time I try to open VLC it stutters and skips to oblivion. I am currently using VLC 1.10 as 2.0 and 2.0.1 were causing me the same problem. I have run multiple antivirus and spyware programs without resolution of the problem. I also upgraded my Windows from XP to Windows 7 which also didn't solve the problem. Thanks for any help!

Use tool called Process Explorer, it will display CPU and memory usage of each process. That way you should be able to figure out process is eating too much CPU or memory.

Here's a text file from Process Explorer when the slow down occurs:

Process PID CPU Private Bytes Working Set Description Company Name
vlc.exe 2840 35.22 124,192 K 102,460 K VLC media player the VideoLAN Team
svchost.exe 2976 79,260 K 14,192 K Host Process for Windows Services Microsoft Corporation
svchost.exe 864 < 0.01 50,704 K 58,336 K Host Process for Windows Services Microsoft Corporation
explorer.exe 2012 0.23 47,292 K 51,904 K Windows Explorer Microsoft Corporation
dwm.exe 1768 15.36 40,832 K 20,900 K Desktop Window Manager Microsoft Corporation
svchost.exe 788 20,360 K 20,472 K Host Process for Windows Services Microsoft Corporation
SearchIndexer.exe 2316 19,636 K 14,620 K Microsoft Windows Search Indexer Microsoft Corporation
procexp.exe 1776 30.71 15,908 K 26,068 K Sysinternals Process Explorer Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com
audiodg.exe 4048 5.88 15,800 K 14,364 K
svchost.exe 896 0.68 14,472 K 26,728 K Host Process for Windows Services Microsoft Corporation
svchost.exe 1308 0.12 14,092 K 16,708 K Host Process for Windows Services Microsoft Corporation
svchost.exe 1484 10,624 K 11,444 K Host Process for Windows Services Microsoft Corporation
svchost.exe 2832 0.02 8,720 K 10,368 K Host Process for Windows Services Microsoft Corporation
wmpnetwk.exe 2428 0.03 8,616 K 8,008 K Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service Microsoft Corporation
taskhost.exe 1336 7,004 K 6,892 K Host Process for Windows Tasks Microsoft Corporation
svchost.exe 1452 0.13 6,828 K 14,124 K Host Process for Windows Services Microsoft Corporation
svchost.exe 1064 0.02 6,532 K 11,508 K Host Process for Windows Services Microsoft Corporation
services.exe 488 4,768 K 7,096 K
spoolsv.exe 1416 4,548 K 8,456 K Spooler SubSystem App Microsoft Corporation
lsass.exe 532 3,196 K 8,304 K Local Security Authority Process Microsoft Corporation
svchost.exe 736 2,940 K 5,824 K Host Process for Windows Services Microsoft Corporation
svchost.exe 664 2,856 K 6,676 K Host Process for Windows Services Microsoft Corporation
rpcld.exe 1496 2,664 K 6,280 K
AppleMobileDeviceService.exe 360 0.05 2,464 K 7,932 K MobileDeviceService Apple Inc.
csrss.exe 440 1.77 1,840 K 13,464 K
iPodService.exe 2132 0.10 1,760 K 4,904 K iPodService Module (32-bit) Apple Inc.
winlogon.exe 520 1,688 K 4,576 K
rpcnet.exe 1648 1,592 K 4,740 K rpcnet Absolute Software Corp.
mDNSResponder.exe 3228 1,488 K 4,200 K Bonjour Service Apple Inc.
csrss.exe 380 0.01 1,324 K 3,152 K
lsm.exe 540 1,236 K 2,880 K
WUDFHost.exe 1168 1,044 K 3,800 K
wininit.exe 432 1,040 K 3,400 K
smss.exe 300 264 K 756 K
System 4 1.13 52 K 2,312 K
System Idle Process 0 0 K 24 K
Interrupts n/a 2.96 0 K 0 K Hardware Interrupts and DPCs

So I'm necro'ing this thread because it may be related and contains 'wudfhost.exe' which norton flagged today as a virus coming from VLC.

Turns out it can be a legitimate windows file typically located in the system32 directory. This one was the only file in the following directory 'c:\users\[username]\appdata\local\windows driver foundation' on an older windows vista system. Norton is telling me it came from vlc-1.1.11-win32.exe and has been present since 2012-2-17. I've gone back and re-downloaded that version of VLC and unpacked the .exe archive to check for wudfhost, but it's not in there...

At this point I'm not sure what to think. Anyone have further info on this supposed virus in relation to VLC?

wudfhost.exe has nothing to do with VLC. We never ever built something like that in any version of VLC.