So I recently bought MCEBuddy and was tipped off that it is always running by Norton Antivirus because of a popup that says “Data Protector blocked a suspicious action by MCEBuddy.Service.exe”. I’m not a fan that this program has a service that is always running and I can find no option to keep it from starting automatically within windows. Why does it need to be always running and communicating with some outside source. Is there any way to change this as I really don’t want to have to kill the process every time I start my computer. Also, if I kill it then MCEBuddy won’t work if I choose to use the program. Ultimately I don’t want to willingly be compromising my computer for the sake of removing commercials for the few items I DVR . On top of that I haven’t found the program to be all that effective - auto commercial removal often leaves commercials, cuts content and audio out of sync, and when using custom cuts 50% of the time it has some error and cannot open the media.
If you don’t want the MCEBuddy engine to run as a service, then change the MCEBuddy service start up behavior to disabled from the windows control panel → Services page
Instead you can use the MCEBuddy command line engine and start it manually from the Start Menu.
You have both options at your disposal.
Welcome to the MCEBuddy community!
Let me start off by saying I’ve been using MCEBuddy for a couple of years now and I trust it completely. I’ve never had it do anything malicious and it has never caused an issue.
Yes, there is a service associated with MCEBuddy that is set to run at startup. This is so it can actively monitor folder locations for new files and process them. For me this is very convenient and really about the only way to do it within Windows.
My past experience with Norton is that it tries to make you worry about things that you really don’t need to worry about so that you get the impression that it is at least doing something. I’ve been working in IT for 20 years and have a good understanding of Windows and applications. I’ve dealt with a lot of anti-virus applications over the years also. Norton does the job it is supposed to do by notifying you of virus’ and potential threats but it is also very bloated and naggy about things that aren’t really a problem.
Now with that being said, I completely understand if you are still concerned and would like to take steps to remedy this potential threat. Thank you for being a diligent net citizen.
Here is what you can do.
Set the Service startup type to Manual (Start\Run type services.msc).
You can control the state of the MCE Service by using the following commands (you can create a shortcut to make it easier).
Start:
sc start MCEBuddy2x
or
net start MCEBuddy2x
Stop:
sc stop MCEBuddy2x
or
net stop MCEBuddy2x
Thanks for the info! I will disable the service and use the command line when I need to use it since I actually only need to use the program intermittently.