LOTRO/DDO Players - important (for you), please read

[Hudson]

My wife downloaded DDO to play with her friends. I logged onto my wireless router today and just by chance noticed it was showing a constant 2Mbps upload.

It turned out after some yanking of cables to be coming from her computer. Further researched nailed it down to PMB.exe, which is Pando Media Player. Apparently this shit is installed with DDO, LOTRO, and god knows what else. Her computer has uploaded 100GB in less than 6 days.

The description of Pando Media Player is:
"The Pando Media Booster is a tiny (2MB) UI-less client that enables you to cost effectively stream full-screen HD video by leveraging your viewer's collective spare bandwidth. Running as a secure transparent background service on your viewer's computer, the Media Booster optimizes video streams by intelligently streaming your videos from multiple sources; your CDN servers as well as the computer's of other viewers ("Peer Cloud")."

I guess in the case of these games its uploading the game to other downloaders.

I will say that I installed LOTRO awhile back and don't have this installed on my system, though it is possible I removed it before knowing what a turd it is because I'm anal retentive about keeping my system clean of applications I am not familiar with and do not use. Part of me also wonders if this thing has been our problem with slow gaming if peoples bandwidth is being greedily consumed.

Long story short, I suggest removing this crud.

Also DD-WRT (Linux based firmware for many router models) is awesome. dd-wrt.com

Edit:
Add FlyFF, Combat Arms, EVE Online, and who knows how many others to the list of potential sources. Seems there are lots of people complaining about it eating all of there bandwidth out there.

Also, the top post here seems to give a reasonable account of what it is/does:
http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.as ... ID=1065424

[Tach Deneva]

Searched for PMB.exe - couldn't find it. Not listed in Task Manager. Going to assume I don't have it, but will be on the alert for it. Thanks!

[Ghost]

Hudson where is this exe program hiding? Where did you find it at?

[Hammer]

i believe what i did was to uninstall the panda stuff once i have the game downloaded and installed. i also make sure nothing is set to start up when my systems starts. i do not believe i have any trace of it on my system.

[Hudson]

Hudson where is this exe program hiding? Where did you find it at?

I don't know where the executable is, but you can actually just install it from Add/Remove Programs or Programs and Features. It should be in there as "Pando Media Booster" or something similar