Transcoding causes pc to shut down

[jonrigg68]

I am running a laptop Pentium M processor 1400 with 512 of ram, it has xp pro service pack 3 installed and the latest GBPVR.

All my movies are divx or xvid. I do not use the pc for watching movies merely running a MVP in my daughters room.

The problem is that I can select a movie from the menu and it will start playing... the pc then runs at 100% cpu, which as it is not doing anything else (normally) is fine, however usually about 20 mins into the movie the film stops and the MVP goes to "contacting server" screen. The laptop for no apparent reason has switched off! it does not do this under any other circumstance so I must assume it is related to the transcoding.....

I wonder if it the processing is causing the cpu to overheat and the pc is shutting down to protect itself....

Any it is currently rendering the MVP useless and worse still my 6 year old daughter totally upset.....

I am looking at either fixing this problem or maybe reencoding movies so that they will play natively.... any one help with either???

[pBS]

yep,sounds like heat issue...i'd get a beefy cpu heatsink/fan...
first, clean the one you have and check the temp just after a transcode..
[motherboard bios usually has a way to see temp]
usually it's just dust clogging the cpu fan making it almost useless...
newer heatsinks have heatpipes and other technologies that make them much more efficient and less prone to clogging..

but if you don't ever watch the avi's natively, easiest to just make mpg's out of them... where do they come from?

[JonnyCam]

unfortunately, choices for cooling a laptop are not great.

Maybe you need to look at one of those laptop stands which has a couple of fans built into it to pull the heat away from the laptop.

Maybe you should see what the shutdown temp in the bios is set to. Then check this vs what is the max temp for your processor, maybe you are able to increase it (as it could be the bios shutting the PC down, not actually the processor itself)

[jonrigg68]

thanks for the tips.. I would like to change the AVI's to MPG, but have a couple of issues namely..

they are a mixture of NTSC and Pal hence converting can cause issues with placement on the screen, secondly have not found a convenient app for batch encoding to MPG, any ideas?