wallpapervideoextension in Sonoma uses lots of RAM and CPU

I've created a script to kill the wallpaper extension every 15 min because this is out of control, I don't even use this thing.

at

/Applications/Scripts/wallpapperkiller.sh

with content, uncomment second line if the ImageExtension also bothers you with high cpu usage.

pgrep WallpaperVideoExtension | xargs kill -9
# pgrep WallpaperImageExtension | xargs kill -9
date > /Applications/Scripts/wallpaperkiller.log

then, run

crontab -e

and add the following line

*/15 * * * * /Applications/Scripts/wallpapperkiller.sh

you can also run this script manually if you want, each other time

more info about crontab can be found here https://medium.com/@justin_ng/how-to-run-your-script-on-a-schedule-using-crontab-on-macos-a-step-by-step-guide-a7ba539acf76

Long time ago I disabled the motion background, but I kept seeing this process:

Shell (Wallpaper) 

And over time it takes a lot of CPU.

When I read your post, I decided to check my screensaver settings and I had recently set it to: "Shell". So I exchanged it for: "Message" and not everything seems to be running smoothly, so my problem was related to the screensaver, not the background, the process indication of Wallpaper was misleading.

Thanks for the hint, I think it helped me, but I will keep an close eye on the process list.

Setting the Start Screen Saver when inactive to never, and just have the display turn off after 10 mins.

seems to have worked, I still get the gray screen, but the wallpaper process is not eating cpu now, and I get the normal background after a a few seconds.

This started happening to me recently. Sonoma 14.6.1. I was seeing the SPOD at odd times. It didn't show up in the Activity Monitor CPU panel, but when I looked at the Disk panel, it had read many gigabytes of data. kill -9 seemed to do the job, and per the suggestion offered, I've turned off the "Show as Screensaver" setting. We'll see what happens. Also, all of my backgrounds are static images, nothing "live."

system settings > wallpaper turn off show as screensaver

basically, the motion background, is constantly accessing the disk rather than via ram, turning this off should stop it. And updating to or beyond 14.3

The video was even stuttering, in my case (upon login). I had at least 30% CPU usage on an M1 at all times.

Killing the process did not work.

What worked for me was a full system restart. - Going back to the old days I guess... the very old days when I had to restart my computer.

So far it has survived 1 day, and a couple of system-sleep and wake-up pairs, and still no extra CPU usage.

If you are not using a live wallpaper and this is an issue open the activity monitor and find that process ID. it will be in the column "pid". open the terminal and do a kill -9 on that process. so if your process ID is 412 enter the following in the terminal

kill -9 412

leroydouglas wrote:

Try uninstalling your "WallpaperVideoExtension" and compare your results.

if this is third party software

Look for a built-in or in-app uninstaller and use that.

If in doubt refer to the developers website; Support/Help/FAQ/known issues/compatibility /updates/uninstall:

Contact a third party vendor

Contact a third-party vendor - Apple Support

Since everyone else seems to have ignored this...

WallpaperVideoExtension is not a third-party item. It's part of macOS Sonoma, and seems to be responsible for showing and managing videos as wallpapers on the desktop and/or lock screen.

There seems to be no way to disable or remove it (it is on the write-protected system partition), and it continues to run and consume CPU/GPU/RAM even when not using video wallpapers.

This problem continues to exist in Sonoma 14.5 with an M2 Pro Mac. My experience:

• a force kill results in WallpaperVideoExtension restarting, almost immediately
• after restart and a few seconds of cool down, it uses 0.0 CPU
• after some time, or some event (sleep?) it returns to using anywhere from 20 to 100% CPU
• the force kill method can be used again to get its CPU usage back to zero

While the script method on a cron would probably be effective, I am not going to use it because I want to see when/if this if fixed.

I've noticed this when the following conditions are met (for me).

I run my MacBook Pro m1 in clamshell mode

I finish work and leave the machine just sitting

Following morning when waking from sleep, the screen is dark grey after entering password to log back in

I use activity monitor to find wallpapervideoextension and kill that process

The normal background (not video) comes back

The MacBook Pro does heat up during the night when this happens. Also, it doesn't happen every day, in my case, the laptop had an uptime of 3 days

11:14  up 3 days, 16:20, 2 users, load averages: 1.80 2.13 3.78

This is annoying, the script elsewhere in this thread does kill the process, but I also don't want to wake up my machine in the middle of the night. So I might set it to run first thing in the morning and last thing at night (daily)

Apple I hope the scenario I described above helps in getting rid of this bug.

This worked for me: on a MBP Pro 2018 MacOS 14.5 2.6 GHz 6-Core i7 16 GB 2400 MHz DDR4

https://www.macobserver.com/tips/how-to/high-ram-usage-wallpapervideoextension/

It has been many more days and the problem never came back.

I can therefore confirm that restarting my computer fixes the problem.

Now let's hope Apple will find a definite, actual fix.

I have video wallpapers disabled, and regularly run into this issue.

Just now, when I woke my mac, the video was playing on my "lock screen" despite being disabled everywhere.

Worse, the system seemed to be playing 30+ copies of the video, all overlaid on top of the others, and they slowly faded out creating this bizarre "ripple" across the default sonoma field video.

It ended too quickly to capture, and switched back to my regular wallpaper but it was definitely trippy.

Right now the process is still running, consuming 85% of my M3 Macbook Pro's CPU, while the system is completely idle.

I'd love to see a permanent fix for this. It's insane to deal with constantly.