How can one resume an interrupted ffmpeg job or pause by design and save some kind of state file?

Question

Attempting to convert a series of mp4's for the umpteenth fricking time using hvec 265 codec to save a buttload of storage space. And this does indeed work quite well but i do not have the luxury of letting the encoding job run and run and run forever and the moron b*****s here very well know that. So the question is, how to resume an interrupted job ? would seem they could build what the last frame looked like by scanning the initial frames if some other data was stored and clip any bad data off the end and re-begin at around the point of the last write.

Was once suggested to pull the parts into smaller pieces and concatenate them but i would think this would require a full reencode of all pieces occurring AFTER the first cutoff point during concatenation to continue the chain unless of course mp4 files can contain MANY video sections.

Answer 1

Depending on what shell you're using you can suspend a process (in posix shells it's with ctrlz, in Powershell you might use suspend-Job) and then resume it. This is true for any shell with job control. You can't quit and save the state from ffmpeg though.

A workaround would be to run the ffmpeg process in a virtual machine. Most linux distros have a minimal server version that would work for this. This would let you save the machine state, and restart the encode at a later date.