Pausing a conversion

[carlmart]

This question, even if related to a present Vidcoder conversion I'm doing now, has to do with several programs that allow pausing a conversion.

Can that pause be done safely, not affecting the conversion?

Usually I carry on such conversions overnight, where they can take full control of the machine. But that also limits things somehow.

[jagabo]

If the program has a pause feature it will not cause problems. But why don't you just run the encoder at low priority. You'll never even notice it's running in the background.

[carlmart]

Where do you set that priority? It sounds like a good idea.

[poisondeathray]

If the GUI doensn't offer the priority option, you can do it in task manager

[jagabo]

I don't use Vidcoder so I don't know if it has an explicit setting. But you can always bring up Task Manager (Alt+Ctrl+Del), go to the Processes tab, Right click on a process and select Set Prioirty -> Low.

[Selur]

As a side note: pausing a encode is possible without losing video quality.

In general, there are two (three) ways to pause a conversion:
a. really pausing the processing (I do this in Hybrid and it works quite well)
pro: easy to implement
con: all memory used is still reserved and all tools are still open and if the mother application which is pausing the other threads (or one of the paused applications) is closed everything is lost
b. by saving the memory and all associated threads (this is kind of what happens if you send your pc into hybernation; don't know of any tool that really does this)
pro: far more elegant, memory is free
con: really hard to implement (especially if you want to do this for an cross-plattform application), large 'application-hybernation-file'
c. stop and restart at a specific point of in the processing queue
pro: memory is free, normally no large file
con: can only be done at specific point (in example between audio and video processing or between 1st and 2nd pass)

Cu Selur