HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. Handbrake can process most common multimedia files and any DVD or BluRay sources that do not contain any kind of copy protection.
Here is a detailed breakdown of HandBrake’s features:
- Built-in Device Presets—Get started with HandBrake in seconds by choosing a profile optimized for your device, or choose a universal profile for standard or high quality conversions. Simple, easy, fast. For those that want more choice, tweak many basic and advanced options to improve your encodes.
- Supported Input Sources—Handbrake can process most common multimedia files and any DVD or Blu-ray sources that do not contain any kind of copy protection.
Outputs:
- File Containers—MP4 and MKV
- Video Encoders—H.264 (x264), MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 (libav), and Theora (libtheora)
- Audio Encoders—AAC, CoreAudio AAC/HE-AAC (OS X Only), MP3, Flac, AC3, or Vorbis/li>
- Audio Pass-thru—AC-3, DTS, DTS-HD, AAC and MP3 tracks
Additional features:
- Title/ Chapter Selection
- Queue up Multiple Encodes
- Chapter Markers
- Subtitles (VobSub, Closed Captions CEA-608, SSA, SRT)
- Constant Quality or Average BitRate Video Encoding
- Support for VFR, CFR and VFR
- Video Filters—Deinterlacing, Decomb, Detelecine, Deblock, Grayscale, Cropping and Scaling
- Live Video Preview
v0.10 releases with hundreds of new features, changes, and bug fixes. To highlight a few:
Encoders
- Intel QuickSync Video is a hardware based H.264 encoder that is available on Intel CPUs. Currently, QSV is only supported on Windows but we hope to bring this to Linux users in the future. Thanks to the good people at Intel for making this possible!
- H.265 is now available through x265 1.4. While this encoder is still fairly new, we have seen some promising results come out of it. It's still under heavy active development and is only going to improve over time!
- VP8 using the libvpx encoder. We have now deprecated Theora (VP3) in favour of VP8 which is a more modern encoder offering better quality encodes at lower file sizes.
- LibFaac has now officially been removed due to GPL compatibility issues, and replaced with the libav AAC encoder as the new default for Windows and Linux. In addition, we have added the FDK AAC encoder for Windows and Linux as a optional compile-time option. The Mac release will continue to use CoreAudio as the default.
- As usual, we've updated a number of the core libraries including x264 and libav
Filters and Scalers
- Denoise - The new NLMeans filter offers much higher quality denoising. Our previous filter, hqdn3d, now accepts individual settings for each of the chroma channels (Cb, Cr).
- OpenCL Scaling - In addition to the default Lanczos scaling algorithm, HandBrake now offers BiCubic scaling on Windows via OpenCL. If the results prove positive, we may roll it out to other platforms in a future release. Thanks to the guys at AMD for building our OpenCL framework!
GUIs
- Feature Parity - A lot of work has been done to bring the user interfaces closer in terms of feature parity. We are now much closer than in any previous release.
- Audio and Subtitle Defaults - The audio and subtitle controls have been overhauled to support default behaviours which can be stored in presets. This simplifies the workflow for many batch encoding scenarios.
There are literally hundreds of other improvements, so check out the release notes for more details.
Download: HandBrake 0.10 | 15.1 MB (Open Source)
Download: HandBrake 64-bit | 16.0 MB
Links: HandBrake Website | Other Operating Systems
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