Any tool to control an x264 encoding process?

[pha7ars3]

I have a usual pc box and it takes a while to back-up my beloved dvd. It's like 16–24 hours for a single movie.

Many things can happen during this time: some dorm dork can come and touch my stuff, or I will need to boot another OS or smth.

So it would be very-pretty-nice to have an ability to pause encoding and to recover it after some kind of accident.

Am I the only one here with such a problem?

[Doom9]

pause and stop are two completely different things. MeGUI offers pausing. x264.exe itself offers resuming after a stop using the -seek commandline option (which you could plug into the "custom commandline options" box in the x264 configuration in MeGUI) to start at a given frame. If you do a search on this subforum, you'll find more details on the seek parameter.

[stephanV]

Using --seek is not really the same as resuming from a complete stop or crash as you will have lost the encoder state.

Something like ELDER might support it though.

[Doom9]

there's no way to keep the encoder state at a random abort.. since it's random, elder won't help either, but as aku pointed on when he created this feature (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=94410&highlight=seek), it basically offers that functionality.. you lose a little here and there and it's obviously not such a smart thing to just abort at a random point, but -seek offers a workable solution.
Still, nothing beats locking your computer.. I wouldn't even consider anybody touch my computer while it's running or even giving them access to my own account.. at least a separate account (and without administrator privileges) is a must for me.

[stephanV]

ELDER can help, because you wouldn't need to keep the encoder state. You could just restart at the previous chunk and everything will be the same. It certainly would be less intrusive on rate control, which is exactly why --seek is not really a good option.

[MeteorRain]

or let x264 save currect status every several seconds to a temp file? or can it be an option? :p