Re: CPU overheating then shutting down while encoding video with ffmpeg

[Joel Roth <joelz@pobox.com>]

Nicolas George wrote:
> Le primidi 1er thermidor, an CCXXIII, Rodolfo Medina a écrit :
> > In Google I found other similar issues but they weren't useful for me to solve
> > the problem.  On my old Hyundai laptop, when running ffmpeg in order to convert
> > a large video format, after a while it says something like the CPU's
> > temperature is reaching a critical value and it's going to shut down, that
> > happens.  I tried to catch that message with stdout/err redirection using '&>'
> > but didn't manage to.  Please help who can.
> 
> FFmpeg does not care about the temperature of your CPU, it just heats it as
> much as possible. Most likely, you would get the same effect with "cat
> /dev/urandom > /dev/null" (possibly several running in parallel to make all
> the cores work), and the same message.
> 
> If you see the message mixed with FFmpeg's output, that is probably because
> you are running it on a text console or the message is critical enough to be
> sent to all pseudo-TTYs. In both cases, the messages are sent directly to
> the terminal, and therefore not affected by the redirections, but you would
> find it in /var/log.
> 
> To find a solution, I would suggest the following steps:
> 
> 0. If you can, open the laptop and clean the dust in the fans.
> 
> 1. Find the exact error message and find exactly who sent it: the kernel
>    itself or an auxiliary daemon.
> 
> 2a. If the message comes from an auxiliary daemon, peruse its documentation
>     to see if you can configure the actions it takes on overheating.
> 
> 2b. If the message comes from the kernel, you can probably find daemons that
>     monitor the temperature and take configurable actions. If not, you can
>     always hack your own in a few lines of shell.
> 
> Either way, to let the CPU cool, the best way is to lower the frequency. But
> if your laptop is very old, it probably can not do that; in that case,
> "killall -STOP ffmpeg" would probably work.

In addition, you could put your laptop up on some blocks, so
the airflow is better, or use an external fan or
vaccuum cleaner to help. 

 
-- 
Joel Roth