[MeaCulpa]

Whether it be IPTV, BBC iPlayer or YouTube live streams (through addons), they all just max out my CPU (and fans, running at 6000+ RPM) within 30 seconds of starting. The fan can go from not spinning at all to max 6K RPM within seconds of opening a stream.

Using a 2015 13" Retina Macbook Pro with 2.9GHz i5 (I5-5287U). The strangest thing is that on my older 2011 2.4GHz 13" Macbook Pro, streams ran fine using about 30% CPU (and with the fans running about 2500RPM) doing the exact same thing. Streaming files hosted online that aren't live video don't use a fraction of the CPU either.

I can also easily have 4 livestreams open on Chrome without using up much CPU at all. So what's the problem?

[MeaCulpa]

Something I've just noticed...

When Kodi is in its separate Desktop environment and it's in focus as the current app, CPU usage when streaming is perfectly reasonable (around 40%), yet if you move to another Desktop environment (three finger swipe) to start browsing the web whilst listening to the audio from Kodi with the livestream still running, it will suddenly boost to 70% usage and then 100% within seconds. This is almost definitely a bug that has probably gone unnoticed.

How peculiar...

[Waltman]

Known issue, see also https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=312370
I disable / close the second desktop to prevent it from happening