Option to pause

[roaldarbol]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Working with long videos (and no GPU...), it takes a long time to track videos. If I do it during the day and it's not finished by the time I'm heading home from the office I'm always in a tight spot. It would be great to have the option of pausing the tracking and then un-pausing once home.

Describe the solution you'd like
The option to pause during both TGrabs and TRex tracking.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Currently I'm working around these by leaving my laptop to track overnight. I've considered making use of a cluster al well, but my bash skills are not quite there yet I feel like.

Additional context
I have no clue whether this is easy or super tricky to implement, so if it is a bit of a hornet's nest just spend your time on better things. ;-) Also, I'm finally running good experiments and with TRex I'm generating masses of data - so a massive thanks your way! Cheers!

[mooch443]

Hey, thanks for your report(s)! You can pause TRex by pressing the , button (when no textfields are selected). Unless I misunderstand what you mean by pause? TGrabs is another matter. Would it be acceptable to resume conversion? I am planning some greater changes, so adding this functionality to TGrabs might be a longer way off at the moment. I am aiming for v2.0 for this (and much more extended functions).

Glad to hear that you're able to use the tool for your purposes, though. :-) It seems you'll likely be very happy with the next update then, which will also include some performance gains (especially for laptops) ;-)

[roaldarbol]

Glad to hear that you're able to use the tool for your purposes, though. :-) It seems you'll likely be very happy with the next update then, which will also include some performance gains (especially for laptops) ;-)

Uh, looking forward to that! Indeed having a great time using TRex! :-D

Didn't know about the , pausing in TRex, good to know(!) - maybe there could be a UI button somewhere (maybe in the top bar?) to make it more accessible?

I think, yes for analysis of individual videos. Ideally, I'd still prefer the option to pause as my use is mostly batch processing. Maybe we can chat a bit about whether there would be tricks to pick up where you left off in a batch script (i.e. how are you achieving this, is something output into logs that could be read in bash or some other way around it)? '
Cause if that would be possible, then yes, absolutely, resuming would very much be exactly what is needed!

[mooch443]

You have already seen the recent update, as I know. :-) There is already a button for that (pause/continue) left of the timeline, while the video is still analysing, btw!

Currently I never had the need to pause/continue conversions. Although it is technically possible with the binary video format that TRex/TGrabs use (.PV). I am not sure how reasonable this is, as you would have to match the parameters you used for converting the first bit, but I think if I just "allow" it without extended support, that'd be feasible. I would just trust the user that this is what they want. I currently imagine a -append flag and it would be able to read from an existing .PV file how far it would have gotten.

This would be incompatible with features like save_raw_movie, of course.