HandBrake, a free, open source video transcoder for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, has been updated to version 0.10.0, getting support for new encoders, like H.265 and VP8, along other interesting changes.
For those who aren't familiar with HandBrake, here's a quick list of features:
- for input sources, HandBrake supports most common multimedia files and any DVD or BluRay sources that do not contain any kind of copy protection;
- supported outputs:
- file containers: MP4 (M4V) and MKV;
- video encoders: H.264 (x264), H.265 (x265) MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 (libav), VP8 (libvpx) and Theora (libtheora);
- audio encoders: AAC,, MP3, Flac, AC3 and Vorbis;
- device presets;
- title / chapter selection;
- chapter markers;
- queue up multiple encoding jobs;
- subtitles support (VobSub, Closed Captions CEA-608, SSA, SRT);
- constant quality or average bitrate video encoding;
- video filters: deinterlacing, decomb, denoise, detelecine, deblock, grayscale, cropping and scaling;
- live video preview;
- comes with graphical and command line interfaces.
Changes in HandBrake 0.10.0 include:
- Libavformat is now used for muxing instead of mp4v2 and libmkv;
- added FDK AAC encoder for Windows and Linux as a optional compile-time option;
- added support for H.265 through x265 1.4 (this encoder is still early in it's development, so is missing many H.265 features and optimizations);
- added VP8 encoder (using libvpx);
- added Lanczos scaler, which is currently HandBrake's default;
- added Bicubic (OpenCL) scaler - requires an AMD or Intel GPU supporting OpenCL 1.1 or later. On Linux, this is only available on the command line for now;
- denoise: hqdn3d filter now accepts individual settings for both chroma channels (Cr, Cb);
- denoise: new NlMeans filter which offers much higher quality denoising (though it is very slow);
- added Windows Phone 8 preset;
- updated libraries: x264 r2479-dd79a61, Libav v10.1 and libbluray 0.5.0;
- the audio and subtitle controls have been overhauled to support default behaviors which can be stored in presets. This simplifies the workflow for many batch encoding scenarios;
- Libfaac has been removed due to GPL compatibility issues, and replaced with the libav AAC encoder as the new default for Windows and Linux;
- removed mcdeint deinterlace and decomb modes. This relied on the snow encoder in libav which has been was removed by upstream;
- Linux only: automatic audio and subtitle track selection behaviors which can be stored per preset;
- Linux only: improvements to Auto-Naming feature;
- Linux only: Batch Add to queue by list selection;
- Linux only: requires GTK3.
This release also includes some Windows-only new features, like Intel QuickSync video encode / decode support and experimental hardware decode support via DXVA.
For more information, see the official HandBrake 0.10.0 changelog.
For more information, see the official HandBrake 0.10.0 changelog.
Note that under Unity, the bottom HandBrake panes may use a dark background - this is a bug caused by Unity's overlay scrollbars and you can fix it by disabling the overlay scrollbars (for instance, using Unity Tweak Tool).
Download HandBrake
Ubuntu 14.10 and 14.04 / Linux Mint 17.1 and 17 (and derivatives) users can install the latest HandBrake by using its official PPA. Add the PPA and install HandBrake using the commands below:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtkThe last command above will install the HandBrake GTK3 GUI. If you want to install the command line version, use the following command (of course, after adding the PPA):
sudo apt-get install handbrake-cliYou may want to check out the HandBrake Guide.
