Hi humans.

If you watch any of my live stream shows (which is a little difficult not to if you read my website, seeing as I post replays of my live stream shows all the time, but then again, I guess you could just easily ignore them), you might already know that whenever I’m live streaming, my laptop overheats to dangerously high temper­a­tures, generally between 90°C and 98°C (which is around 200-210°F). Usually during stream, you’ll hear me saying, “I think my laptop is melting.”

Of course, the surface of the laptop isn’t this hot, or else I would be burning my hands as I type – this is the temperature of the processor inside.

The processor is what’s doing most of the work inside of my laptop, so if something goes wrong with it, it will force the laptop to shut down so it stops processing information and gets an opportunity to cool down. This usually happens when it reaches around 100-102°C, which is past the point at which water boils.

Of course, I realized that my processor is working hard to stream what’s on my screen, but I just couldn’t understand why it would do this when all I had open was a Flash game on Google Chrome, Skype, and the streaming client. Based off the background knowledge I had, I knew that there was something wrong, but I just couldn’t figure out what.

Then, XSplit notified me yesterday that it had an update. I updated the software, then went into the settings to see if there were any new options or features that I could change. Then, I made a sudden discovery as to what the problem was.

I noticed that the option to save a local recording of everything to my hard drive was selected. I went to the directory in which it claimed it would save my files, and there they were – every single stream I have ever done in the past, saved locally as Flash video files.

If you’re not familiar with video production, this might sound a bit confusing or meaningless. In simpler terms, my laptop was taking the stuff that was on my screen and making two copies of it, one to send to Twitch.TV to broadcast publicly, and one to save to my personal archives. Basically, it was unnecessarily doing twice the work that it had to do, without me telling it to do the extra work.

I turned off the local recording option and did another test stream, and saw incredible results. My laptop never exceeded 90°C, and usually fluctuated around 80-82°C (which is still really hot, but an excellent improvement and nowhere near the danger zone that might cause my laptop to commit suicide or melt).

So, if you happen to have problems with XSplit right now and the fact that it’s making your laptop or computer overheat, try looking in the settings to see if you have local recordings turned on.

Some people might actually want to keep a local copy for their personal archive, but it’s completely un­nec­es­sary to do this in real time while you’re streaming to the Internet. Once you’re done with your stream, you can head on over to Twich.TV and pull up your video replay. Then, you can use something like the Download Helper plug-in on Mozilla Firefox to download your replay after you’re done streaming. Yes, it does take a little bit of extra time, but this is something that you can set and forget about overnight, and it drastically decreases the load on your computer.