I am specifically concerned with converting videos with ffmpeg. My machine gets too hot and I get too worried. I don't mind if it takes longer as soon as it goes easier on my hardware. I tried nice, but it didn't seem to make any difference. Any suggestions?

Yup. Look at cpupower

On all of my machines passed 4th gen, I throttle down the CPU to encode videos with ffmpeg. I'm not about to let my processor run at 180F (82C) for 30-40 min.

I have an i7 4790 for example, it has air cooling, a normal heat sink, with a normal cooling fan on it. It will run at burst speed, which is 4GHZ while encoding video with ffmpeg. That's too fast/hot for it. I bump it down to 3.2-3.4 GHz. while encoding. Depends on the time of year, but that will keep it at or under 135F (57C).

I need my machines to last for a while. And, that will of course drop your fps output as much as 10-15 fps.

Edit:
Just make a menu item/items for

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nice will lower the priority of the process, but will not slow it down.
here is another solution/way: https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...pu-temperature

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My BIOS has an option for setting the level at which the CPU starts throttling to keep temperature down.

I would hate to have to remember to do it for individual processes.

You can look at them to see how they work.

https://github.com/deinstapel/cpupower
https://github.com/opsengine/cpulimit

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cpulimit seems to work well. The task becomes noticeably slower, but the CPU won't heat up anymore.

It's interesting to note that there is some difference in speed but very little difference in temperature between 40% and 99%. At 100% the temperature spikes a little occasionally, but still not much, so I suppose 99% is some kind of sweet spot.

I am marking this as SOLVED. My only nag is that I have to run 'ffmpeg' on a terminal and 'cpulimit -e ffmpeg -l 99' on another. Is there some clever way of doing the two things with a one simple one liner?

What CPU do you have? A desktop is easier to maintain low temps without sacrificing performance. I had a OC'd 4790K with a Noctua NH-D15. That cooler was enough to keep temps in check.

My last Intel laptop had a 4710MQ. Being an older laptop, it would thermal throttle under almost any load. After fresh thermal paste, and using a program called intel-undervolt, I was able to keep the CPU from throttling, even with consistent load like mprime (prime 95).

It's an eight-year-old i5 desktop.

Cgroups? Probably overkill, but here's one link:

https://andywine.dev/constrain-proce...-with-cgroups/.

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A simple script (untested) to combine the 2 cmds
Strictly speaking you could insert the '$!' directly into the last cmd instead, but I really like properly named vars ...

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