Old Sony Vaio laptop with Fedora 30 gets very hot when playing videos!

I think this is because youtube generates videos in html5 that leverage chip hardware that my Sony Vaio (SZ730 with T8100 2.1GHz Penryn) and its ancient 10-year-old cpu don't have acceleration for?

When I play videos on my Toshiba with its newer Ivy Bridge i5-3210M CPU (2.5GHz) cpu, it's just fine thermally and that's using the wimpy integrated video hardware in the Ivy Bridge cpu.

Am I right? By heat I mean the entire body of the laptop gets so hot it's uncomfortable on the lap.

The only other thing is that the Sony is dual gpu (integrated into the Penryn and a discrete NVidia GT8400M GS) and maybe it's heated from the Nvidia?

What command can I use in Fedora to confirm if the Nvidia card is powered off? (that is, find out which of the IGP or the 8400M GS is being used)
I don't know, but I can confirm that the YouTube player is absolutely brutal on older hardware. I have a 2009 MacBook and it gets really hot when playing YouTube videos (or doing anything else on heavy websites in Chrome).

I don't believe it is a GPU issue, but a CPU issue.
It probably involves both; the CPU likely doesn't keep up with high-resolution modern video codecs, and there's not hardware decode acceleration in the IGP.

That T8100 CPU is likely paired with a GM965 or something which is a remarkably awful IGP for which there is no support for hardware accelerated video decode. The Nvidia graphics probably can support hardware decode, though dual graphics is tricky to use, especially with that early hardware.

The magic term for GPU switching you need is 'PRIME'. That's likely not burning power doing nothing and should be able to handle video decode, so you're probably just pushing the CPU very hard. Presumably correct PRIME configuration should allow the machine to more comfortably run video decode.
Does it have fans inside or is it fan-less? If it has fans try cleaning it out. Regardless of if it has fans or not maybe consider an external fan.
I wonder if the flash player for firefox still works? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-flash-player/

Does it overheat when playing videos locally?
  
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