Put the Handbrake on Handbrake

[fdandy006]

Hi Guys,
I currently have my 875chip O/C to 3.6ghz. With my noctua cooling fan it keeps the cpu for normal mac use around 30-35c.

However as soon as I start using a more CPU intensive app like Handbrake - the beast is unleashed and the cpu temps go up to around 58-65 with a CPU usage of 600-650%.

If left running for a while (during bluray rip to mkv conversion) - it eventually gets up to 67-69c which gets me nervous.

So - I found this cool little cmd line utility that throttles the process you attach it to (via the PID).

http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html

Now I can tame handbrake and have it running smoothly at 500% cpu with a temp around 55c.

Since it is cmd line - it is possible to create a script to automate things for you.
ie - find the PID(google 'pidof mac') for the app you are running (as PID's change), then apply the preselected amount of throttle you want - ie, if I give it ./cputhrottle PID 250 it throttles the cpu usage down to 500%. This will most likely be different for differnt people.

You can also use this to throttle cpu greedy apps however I'm sure there are more sophisticated apps out there to do this.


**Disclaimer - Im not sure if this has any adverse effects to your CPU or OSX install so use caution. I have had no issues under a 1hr test.
Cheers

 

[jorpe]

why does 69* get you nervous?

 

[rabbit74]

Nice Tip!

I did not know you could use Handbrake for this operation. Handbrake won't deal with BluRays on my machine. Is there an additional plugin required?

rabbit.

 

[fdandy006]

I use Mac Blurayripper pro(only have trial - 5 free rips) which allows you to dump your Blurays to a MKV (however does not let you control size).

I then use Handbrake to resize the MKV to something more suitable.

You can get All-in-one products (pavtube) and I have tested a trial version of that but it cost $49 for a full version. The pavtube trial embeds a watermark on your video so only good to test performance.

 

[fdandy006]

why does 69* get you nervous?

Thought I read somewhere that 70c is good to stay below for i7 875k chips.

I have pushed past this in the past when I had the cpu o/c to 3.8ghz. It got a bit unstable when running hot but could be due to other o/c settings I had on etc.

Im happy to sit at 3.6ghz.

Cheers

 

[rabbit74]

This one does a pretty good job too.

http://www.makemkv.com/download/

r.

 

[3tybagig]

I found another way to throttle Handbrake.

Ref: https://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=18470

like JohnAStebbins said, HandBrake will grab as much of your cpu is available, though I believe it is supposed to run it at a lower priority than other processes, so it shouldn't be freezing your machine or anything.

Anyway, the advanced settings box appears at the bottom of the tab labeled 'Advanced.' If you just open the program without touching anything else (i.e., the Regular/Normal preset), it should say "ref=2:bframes=2:subq=6:mixed-refs=0:weightb=0:8x8dct=0:trellis=0". If you add ":threads=[however many cores you want to use]" to the end of that string, it will confine the program to that number of cores instead of grabbing everything that's available. (the colon separates that option from the rest of the code; if you want to add more options, you would separate each one out with a colon).

Obviously, the fewer threads it uses, the longer it will take to finish the job.

Ty