(iBoyd)

Stop wmpenc.exe from Hogging CPU/Disk

By Boyd, April 1, 2008 11:35 pm

For the past few weeks, my system running Windows Vista Media Center has been a bit sick. At seemingly random times, the hard drive would start crunching away abnormally. Upon further investigation, I discovered that a process known as wmpenc.exe was taking as much CPU as it could get (near 100%). After a bit of digging for information on issues with this process and Windows Media Center, I finally figured out that it was just Windows Media Player trying to be a bit too helpful.

From time to time, I synchronize my portable media player with Windows Media Center / Windows Media Player. My sync list includes, among other things, all of the TV I’ve recorded in the past week. I believe that wmpenc.exe was actually transcoding the recordings and caching them so that my next sync would be faster. There are two disadvantages to this: First, the cache size was set to 15GB, which is a lot of space on my measly 160GB drive. Second, the process ran at times when the system was not idle and affected the performance of Media Center. Fortunately, disabling caching is fairly simple, provided you know where to look.

The first step is to get to the devices tab in Windows Media Player 11. Do this by opening Windows Media Player and right-clicking near the top of the window. In the menu that appears, go to Tools -> Options… and click the Devices tab in the options dialog that appears:

Devices Tab

Next, Advanced… button near the bottom of the dialog window. You should see this pop up:

Conversion Options

Now, it should be pretty self-explanatory at this point. I unchecked Allow video files to convert in the background, changed the Amount of disk space to use to 5GB, and clicked Delete Files to, well, delete the files. You may want to customize the settings a bit. I just wanted the damn thing turned off for the time being. It’s definitely important that you complete this procedure while logged in as the primary Windows Media Center user, if you have one. However, I recommend you do this for each and every user on the system.

Happy MCE-ing!