debian 12.11
system memory size: 31GiB, 2 15.5 GiB cards
cpu: Intel® Core™ i7-7500U CPU @ 2.70GHz, version: 6.142.9, size: 3268MHz, capacity: 3500MHz, width: 64 bits
no graphics card whatsoever
computer can play h.265 and equivalent without troubles, provided video file is no higher than 1080 p.
Computer can play av1 files no higher than 1080 p only if I shut every other application down. If for example I run a browser and an av1 file with either mpv or vlc, system shuts down.
Can I put all that memory to use and avoid overloading the cpu?
Most of the answers seem to focus on the main problem, but your question got me thinking.
Since you are not getting shutdowns with lower qualities, maybe you could use RAM to play those videos.
Set up tmpfs. Before you start all the other things, use ffmpeg to recode the video to something without any compression, maybe tell it to not work too fast (like work on one frame at a time), and put the thing on that tmpfs. Maybe then playing this new file would be less demanding. The key would be to not force it to provide 30fps of encoded video
Although… Are you sure all this RAM is fine? Maybe it shuts down on more demanding videos because with those the RAM usage raises to the faulty part?
Saying RAM can help because you can reencode the video to h.264 or h.265 to make use of hardware decoding is more than a bit of a stretch. You can just reencode it to the normal disk instead. Unless it’s the speed of the local block device that’s the bottleneck here (and there’s no indication that it is, and it would be extremely unlikely), using a ramdisk/tmpfs for any part of that is just pointless.
Yes, but that was in the OP. Maybe normal disk is not feasible for some reason