High CPU temps after update to vlc 3.0.1-2
Running arch linux fully up to date. Previous version of vlc was running without issue until update to vlc (2.2.8-4 -> 3.0.1-2). Started vlc within plasma desktop. CPU usage and temp rose both before and after playing video from the Playlist View set as docked, which was the setup I have been running previously without issues.
I tried a different approach. Firstly I removed the vlc config with "rm -fr .config/vlc", and then restarted vlc clean. There was no abnormal cpu load or temperature rise. I could play a video using Media -> Open file, but if I selected View Playlist from the View menu, then as soon as I went to Computer -> My Videos then the cpu temp would begin to rise, and would then stay high if playing video files and after stopping playback!
Selecting vaapi from the codecs menu tab made no difference.
After some investigation discovered a work around - but needs to be done immediately after upgrading vlc to version 3.0 or higher from a version <3.0.
Start by doing:
rm -fr .local/share/vlc rm -fr .config/vlc
and also removing any .cache entries for vlc, and then start vlc 3.0.1 clean, and then go directly to Tools -> Preferences and select "All" from the "Show Settings" item at the bottom left of the Preferences screen. Then scroll down to Playlist and click on it, then uncheck "Automatically preparse items", and "Save". Then close vlc down, and start it up again, before then going to "View"->"Playlist" and select from the file tree to get to the videos in the user area, leading to no high CPU usage.
With this set of steps the problem is no longer present. It shouldn't be necessary to go through this process at all if the upgrade of VLC was set up to avoid the issue. So I would leave this bug open until there it is sure that this issue is resolved in a new version of vlc > 3.0.1-2
Having a high CPU merely by upgrading the package from version <3.0 to 3.0 or higher seems to be a bug that hopefully will be resolved by patching the code?
Activity
I have just found that there is another ticket that seems directly related to this issue where the same problem was observed in Windows - #19682
Same issue here on OSX. But for me it was with "My Music" instead of "My Videos". But different from the OP I've only got 2GB of stuff in here, most of which is in the "iTunes/Album Artwork/" subfolder. In there are 6000 ".itc" files.
I didn't have to go through all the steps that the OP posted as a workaround. This was enough for me:
go directly to Tools -> Preferences and select "All" from the "Show Settings" item at the bottom left of the Preferences screen. Then scroll down to Playlist and click on it, then uncheck "Automatically preparse items", and "Save". Then close vlc down, and start it up again
I was recently having the same issues with high cpu usage with VLC too just on Windows 10, and after searching for a solution and finding this thread, I unchecked the "Automatically preparse items" option and no more cpu spikes! I just literally made an account here to say thank you very much for this workaround, and hopefully a future update will fix this.
Edit: I recently ran into the high cpu issue again despite "automatically preparse items" being unchecked, so I went back into the playlist settings and also unchecked "allow metadata network access" and that seemed to help too, as cpu usage went back down and hasn't spiked since; your mileage may vary when unchecking that, but it helped in my case, so I just thought I'd post it and hopefully it'll help someone else who runs into that again.
Edited by Shirley Rougelymarked this issue as related to #19682
added Component::Core label
