How to pause MeGUI?

[dimtim]

Hey guys I'm trying to encode some mkv videos using x264 and MeGUI and it takes a really long time to complete (which is fine with me) but I'm curious, how do you pause an encode once it starts in MeGUI. I see a pause button, but its like grayed out and I can't click anything.

Thanks
Tim

[linyx]

You can pause an encode with StaxRip (http://www.planetdvb.net/staxrip). I am not sure about MeGUI, though. Also, IIRC, pausing can slow the encode way down.

[dimtim]

Well it doesn't make sense because there is a pause button but it doesn't do anything. I'm trying to find a way to free up some CPU so I can watch a blu-ray movie, and not have to abort encoding, because if I try to do both at the same time the movie stutters.

[Avenger007]

How about setting the priority to low?
If not, then try Process Explorer and suspend x264.exe

[dat720]

Like Avenger said set Priority to Low and if you have a MultiCore CPU then set Affinity to only 1 of the Cores, If you make sure the priority of the player is higher than the encoder it should playback fine.

[dimtim]

Alright I'll try those thanks a lot.

[Flux]

This may sound stupid but why it is so hard to make "Pause" for encoding? For example, sometimes there might be a situation where you have to power-off your computer or computer shutdown because of power failure.

I know that MeGUI doesn't cost anything and no one can really demand anything. I'm just trying to understand.

[Dark Shikari]

This may sound stupid but why it is so hard to make "Pause" for encoding? For example, sometimes there might be a situation where you have to power-off your computer or computer shutdown because of power failure.Press the "standby" or "hibernate" buttons on your computer?

[dimtim]

It definitely would be convenient at times. Like I've said though, there is a pause button, it's just grayed out for some reason. The stop button doesn't do anything either (you have to use abort) so maybe they're planning on implementing those or something.

[Doom9]

No idea why it's greyed out though when I was still working on it, you could definitely pause most types of jobs (if you use parallel encoding things obviously are a bit different these days) - however, there's one important thing you need to be aware of: your PC doesn't save state automatically.. let's assume you play a game.. unless you save, if your PC crashes or you unplug it, your progress is gone. The same applies to pretty much any software. There are a few that have auto-save where applicable but that's only doable in certain cases - video encoders generally don't have a way to stop at some point and take off exactly where you left off again - so regardless of how smart the intelligent wrapper like megui can be, there's no way it can offer you a way to shut down your PC completely and just restart at frame X in pass Y the next day.

And as far as pausing goes.. running at idle priority (used to be the default when I was still running megui) is your best bet.. no matter what app you're running, megui will only use as much cpu as is available and if you run something else that takes a lot of horsepower, that something else will get absolute priority so there's no need to actually suspend encoding if you can go at 0.xxxx1 fps.

[dimtim]

Sounds good, unfortunately I don't see a way to set the priority to idle, the lowest it goes is low in both task manager and the status window of the encode.

[Sharktooth]

low should be ok, since your player should be set to normal (by default)... and having a higher priority, most CPU cycles will be dedicated to the player and "stolen" from the lower priority processes.

@doom9: there were a lot of changes since you left and even if development has slow down recently, the project is still active.

[dat720]

Low = Idle, which means anything set above low will take priority and anything with higher than low priority will get more PCU time than the Low tasks.

Are you changing the priority of MeGUI or x264.exe?

[Flux]

How about if I encode the first 10,000 frames to its own file, then encode the rest 10,000 frames to its own file, and after that merge these together, would the video be practically same (quality, playback, etc.) as a video which has been encoded to one file with all 20,000 frames in one go?

This way I could split the work from one video if it works correctly.