How many bytes have been written so far
Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2020 10:50 pm
Quite often I have a desired file size in mind for the compressed video file. Of course, I could set the desired bit rate with full two-pass encoding, but that is so slow I usually just take a guess at what RF setting (constant quality) is required. Often at say 20% complete, I will hit stop and see what the file size is. Multiplying by 5 will give me a rough estimate of the final file size, which might already be obviously way too small or too big. Then I can restart the encoding at a different RF setting. But suppose it is reasonably on target. I would hit start again, but it would simply start all over again from the beginning wasting all that perfectly good encoding done up to that point. So annoying. If instead of stop, I hit pause, then I can restart again without losing the work done, but when it pauses it doesn't write anything to disk. The file size is still zero. Is there any way to interrogate Handbrake at that point to find out how much data is in its data buffers or a way to dump the buffers to a file so I can judge the progress? If not, it seems crazy that what is happening with the encoding is such a deep dark secret until the moment of truth at the very end when you find out if the last hour was a complete waste of cpu cycles or not. (I'm using the latest handbrake release, or sometimes the latest nightly build. I don't know if this question is operating system dependent, but in any case, I'm using Windows 10).