Queue

The Queue is where approved work actually runs. Jobs arrive from Compress and from Organise.

The rows

Column	What it shows
File	The output name — the reviewed rename, unless this run bypassed it
Progress	Percentage, with live speed and ETA while running
Elapsed	Wall-clock time since this row started
Size	The output file’s size

Rows encode in the order shown, and can be dragged into a different one before they start.

Job states

State	Meaning
Queued	Waiting its turn, or stopped by you and ready to run again
Running	Encoding now, with live progress
Paused	Suspended mid-encode by Pause
Done	Finished, output written
Error	Failed — the reason is shown on the row

Controls

Start Queue begins. Once some rows have finished it reads Resume queue instead, and picks up where it stopped rather than starting over.

Pause and Stop, on the right above the table, act on the file encoding now and nothing else. They stay there whatever the queue is doing, greyed out while nothing is encoding. Beside them, View encode history opens Settings → Logs → Encode history, the record of everything written before, including in earlier sessions.

Pause genuinely suspends the running encoder process — zero CPU while paused, not a job that keeps burning through your evening in the background. The button then reads Resume, which carries on from where it was, not from the start of the file. Only the encoding itself can be paused: a file that is only being remuxed, or one still extracting subtitles before it encodes, can’t be, and the Queue says so rather than showing it as paused.

Stop stops the file encoding, after asking first. Its progress is lost, the row goes back to Queued so you can run it again later, and the queue moves on to the next file. Clear queue removes every row, and also asks first if something is currently encoding.

Whether a remux keeps the original file is set in Settings > General, under Keep the original file. Closing FileVerdict while the queue is running asks first as well, because closing cancels the encode.

Back to Organise returns to the review screen without disturbing the queue.

When the queue finishes

FileVerdict can send a notification when the queue finishes or a file fails, and put the PC to sleep or shut it down once the queue is done, after a 60-second countdown you can cancel. Both are set in Settings > General, under Queue. While sleep or shut down is set, the Queue screen says so under its status line, with a link to change it.

The PC is kept awake while the queue runs, so an overnight queue isn’t stopped halfway through by the PC’s own sleep timer.

Two kinds of job

Not everything in the queue is a re-encode.

A job from Compress runs a real encode and takes as long as encoding takes. A job that only applies track edits and a rename is a remux — it rewrites the container without touching the video stream, which is fast and lossless.

Both appear as rows here and both are recorded in Settings → Logs → Encode history, which notes which mode ran and, for real encodes, the settings that were used.

Progress figures

The ETA is computed from the encoder’s own reported speed against the media still to process, rather than extrapolated from elapsed time versus percentage. It stays blank until there is a real speed sample to work from — an ETA that starts at forty minutes and settles at eight is worse than no ETA.

A two-pass job weights its overall bar 40/60 between the two passes, because the analysis pass is faster than the one that does the work.

On Windows, FileVerdict’s taskbar button shows the progress of the file encoding right now, so you can follow it with the window minimised. It fills for that one file, not the whole queue, and starts again for the next. It turns yellow while the queue is paused. A file that is only being remuxed has no percentage to show, so the bar moves back and forth instead.

Your originals

Nothing is deleted. Finished jobs leave the source file where it was; the footer says as much. If Keep the original file is off in Settings, edits are written in place instead of to a new file — that is the one case where the original does not survive, and it is off by default for exactly that reason.

An encode never writes over another file either. Encode the same video twice and the second is saved beside the first with a number, like Some Movie (2015) (2).mkv. The number is only in the file’s name: the title inside the file stays Some Movie (2015). In your library folders it’s saved as another version instead, Some Movie (2015) - 2.mkv, the name Plex and Jellyfin read that way.

When a job fails

The row stays and reports why rather than vanishing. Common causes are in Troubleshooting, and Settings → Logs → Diagnostics carries the fuller record.