
HandBrake 1.0.0 Released - bomanbot
https://handbrake.fr/news.php?article=37
======
bsharitt
HandBrake is one of those pieces of software that I've never even had to
consider looking around to find something slightly better, it's always done
what its supposed to with no fuss. A while back I wanted to rip a DVD my kids
got so they could watch it on their tablets and downloading HandBrake was such
a no brainer that I entirely forgot that I don't have an optical drive built
into any of my computers anymore before installing it.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
When I switched from OpenSuse to MacOS as my primary desktop, I needed a
replacement for DVDrip (although, there is a dvdrip for Mac via brew but I had
trouble getting it to work.

Handbrake was the top search hit and immediately became my workhorse for
ripping DVDs. (Main use case is to rip my own DVDs for more convenient viewing
on another device)

Well done, Handbrake.fr By the way, mine is version 0.10.5 and when I tell it
to check for updates, it says:

 _HandBrake 0.10.5 x86_64 is currently the newest version available._

I guess the update isn't in the queue quite yet.

~~~
tatoalo
If your encoding queue is empty than it should update...otherwise you can
always find it here[0]

[0]: [https://handbrake.fr/downloads.php](https://handbrake.fr/downloads.php)

------
forinti
I love this software. I rip my kids' DVDs using it and play them on a
Raspberry Pi with Kodi. This way I don't have to wade through menus, language
selection (never defaults to mine), commercials, and ridiculous piracy
warnings (I paid for it! Don't treat me like a criminal).

~~~
raverbashing
Yes, the absurd of piracy warnings is ridiculous

Really makes me think twice about giving them my money

~~~
fredley
Nothing makes me want to go out and pirate something purely as an act of
defiance than unskippable piracy warnings.

~~~
dvdhnt
For me, it's definitely the un-skippable advertisements. Like, as a software
developer and user, I despise when an API is exposed that allows an
application or website to suspend expected behavior in favor of custom
hijinks, but to me, that's exactly what ignoring my menu and main-menu buttons
is.

~~~
MereInterest
Especially when it is enforced by licensing terms. At some level, it is just a
bit that gets interpreted by the software as "ignore these user commands". It
is very reasonable to make a player that listens to the user commands, even if
that bit is set. At a different level, it is a requirement under the terms of
the patent licensing to implement this "feature", or else be in violation of
patent infringement.

------
brownbat
I often wonder if archivists are out there somewhere, armed with HandBrake,
ripping every DVD they can find into a digital format for preservation beyond
the life of the disc.

I've been fascinated with some projects that have tried to recreate the
original theater experience of the original Star Wars,[0] or groups trying to
capture classics that influenced Chinese cinema but haven't been widely
reproduced, like Red Heroine.[1]

If everything moves to streaming though, even that could become impossible.
Wonder how long until they'll stop printing DVDs...

[0]
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:b1Dmiou...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:b1DmioumGp8J:www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/the-
star-wars-george-lucas-doesnt-want-you-to-
see/379184/&num=1&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obpyt_tYxCU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obpyt_tYxCU)

~~~
aw3c2
Rest assured that there are archivists ripping their discs losslessly
somewhere in the dark corners of the internet. Hidden because the copyright
mafia will otherwise ruin their lives.

~~~
walterbell
What's the best software for lossless archival ripping?

~~~
ldjb
I have used DVD Decrypter [0] (unfortunately Windows-only) to make ISOs from
DVDs. All the menus are retained, so I can still access special features
(image galleries, character profiles, etc.).

I also hear good things about MakeMKV [1], which apparently allows some sort
of lossless ripping of video files (I haven't used it, so I cannot confirm
this), although the MKV format does not support menus.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter)

[1] [http://www.makemkv.com/](http://www.makemkv.com/)

~~~
rodgerd
I'll second DVD Decrypter. I archive DVDs with that, then use handbrake to
pull all the useful bits (the film and special features, or programs in the
case of TV series) for Kodi.

------
pulse7
HandBrake found me a defective RAM module on my PC: it freezed in the middle
of video conversion - every single time on exactly the same video position.
After further investigation I found the "bug" in my RAM...

~~~
chrisper
How is that even possible with virtual memory and paging? Why would the same
video data or whatever go to the same physical location every time?

~~~
dahart
I can imagine bunches of possibilities. Paging can make things hard to
predict, especially when multiple programs are allocating memory, but it
doesn't make the system non-deterministic, nor does it make hitting the same
physical address impossible.

One possibility is that he didn't restart the program between retries, and the
memory in question was already allocated. Another possibility is that he only
ran handbrake and nothing else, and the OS was in more or less the same state
both times. It could be that the problem was triggered by stack allocations
rather than heap allocations and the video block in question caused a large-
ish recursion that hit the problem, and would be likely to hit the problem no
matter what was running since it's somewhat rare to have large stack
allocations.

Chances are it was actually none of those things, but they're real
possibilities anyway.

~~~
pulse7
Maybe my Handbrake installation was broken because of defective RAM - I don't
know exactly... anyway: I found the problem was RAM and now it works...

~~~
chrisper
It's actually scary how much (unpredictable and maybe undetectable) stuff can
happen due to bad RAM.

~~~
rikkus
I once had a bad RAM socket. I sent back RAM that failed memtest86 and was
rather confused when the next set failed in the same way.

------
adim86
It is amazing to see software that is about 10 years old just hitting 1.0.
Never really quite understood that. Is the developer just not confident in it
that it is in beta for a while? or is it just a style of versioning? Anyways
glad to see development on handbreak.Great software!

~~~
bluejekyll
Versioning is generally arbitrary. I actually don't know why people pay so
much attention to it.

1.0 for some people, is 0.1 for others.

1.0 might mean it's stable, or it could meant that it's feature complete. As
you say it could also be used to convey the confidence the developers have in
the software.

The thing I find most important myself is conveying compatibility, i.e.
semver. To me that tells me it will be easy to upgrade a library, or it could
be hard.

~~~
alephnil
It is not completely arbitrary though. Usually 1.0 for proprietary software
means "the first version shipped to customers", while for open source, the
very first commit is 0.0, and then it goes from there. Since it is public from
the start there is no 1.0 moment. Sometimes, especially for programming
languages, the 1.0 version is used to signal that from no on there will be no
arbitrary change to syntax or semantics after that, so that it can be relied
on.

Traditionally, version numbering has been used to signal the significance of
the release. for version x.y.z, you could expect that

    
    
      * x is incremented: Major new features, possibly incompatibilities
      * y incremented but not x: Minor new features and bug fixes.
      * z changed only: Bug fixes only.
    

This was generally observed in both proprietary and open source software
alike, and is still used in many projects. Recently many projects has
abandoned this pattern, including Chrome and Firefox, the Linux kernel and
others.

Of cause there has always been a pressure from the marketing departments to
have a new major release, while the engineers has been holding back, so you
have always seen major releases that isn't that major, and sometimes
incompatible changes sneaked into minor releases. The latter has generally
been considered bad form.

------
dperfect
HandBrake offers a really nice GUI for many one-off transcoding tasks. If
you're looking to automate transcoding tasks with some scripting, handbrake-
cli (or ffmpeg directly) are very powerful, albeit overwhelming at times.

For something in the middle - offering both convenience and scriptability - I
recommend video_transcoding[1] (uses handbrake-cli and ffmpeg under the
covers). It's a really handy set of command-line tools that eliminate a lot of
the guesswork and frustration.

[1]
[https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding](https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding)

------
NelsonMinar
I'm a little surprised they aren't signing their MacOS releases. It's even
documented on the download page, "We are not currently able to sign the
HandBrake downloads". I wonder if it's a philosophical choice or a legal one?
It seems like a failure of Apple's Gatekeeper though: either because such a
popular app is not able to be signed, or because it's not signed and yet so
many people run it anyway.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> I'm a little surprised they aren't signing their MacOS releases.

Do any small developers actually do this? It seems entirely useless from a
security prospective. You go through an expensive process so that at the end
it can "verify" that the binary was signed by an individual the user has never
met who may not even live in the same country and for all anyone knows is
perfectly willing to sign ransomware, or who has stolen some arbitrary third
party's signing key.

If you don't actually know and trust the party who makes the software then the
signature is worse than useless because it makes people think
signed=trustworthy when in reality it only means signed=signed. And if you do
know and trust the authors you don't need a CA to verify anything more, at
great expense, when you can already just download via HTTPS from the domain
you trust.

Apple should eliminate practice entirely, and in the meantime no one should
use it.

~~~
aianus
> If you don't actually know and trust the party who makes the software then
> the signature is worse than useless

Not true. The signature only needs to mean "we've verified the author's ID and
he lives in a country that enforces the law". Then if he ships and signs
malware, he can be sued and/or charged criminally.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> The signature only needs to mean "we've verified the author's ID and he
> lives in a country that enforces the law". Then if he ships and signs
> malware, he can be sued and/or charged criminally.

This is what I mean by worse than useless. Promoting reliance on the signature
to mean something.

To pick a country, quite a lot of entirely legitimate software comes out of
Russia. So does a lot of malware. Does Russia enforce the law? Sure, against
people who aren't politically connected. Some of the malware authors are, so
you're screwed. You can't just write off a country like that. There is still a
baby in that bathwater. And that's not the only country with organized crime
or corruption.

As soon as you have many small developers signing things you can't even really
exclude by country at all because there are too many soft targets for malware
authors to steal keys from. Some college student gets a signing key to sign
his calculator app and then gets hacked, and now there is malware signed by
John Smith of New Jersey. By the time anyone figures it out the attackers, now
equipped with the false sense of security created by the signature, have
hacked many other people and captured even more signing keys.

It's like security theater where the criminals pick your pocket while you're
distracted watching the show.

------
weisser
I'm a huge fan of HandBrake and excited to see them still improving the
application. The last time I used a DVD ripper was >5 years ago but it was an
essential tool for me earlier in life. I'm happy to see I will still have it
available should I need to use it.

~~~
kalleboo
I haven't ripped a DVD in ages, but I still use HandBrake all the time for
user-friendly h.264 encoding for crushing files to fit on my phone or on the
web. It works with any input that ffmpeg supports.

------
junto
I love Handbrake. It's my goto for video transcoding.

I often download stuff for my children from YouTube using a YouTube
downloader, and then transcode them to the ideal iPad format, so the children
can watch stuff in the car on the iPad without an internet connection. Great
for long trips.

~~~
kennell
An iPad can't play regular MP4/H264 videos by default?

~~~
evgen
It can, but you can optimize the encoding so that the iPad needs to do less
work playing the video.

------
gigatexal
I've so much respect for the team behind handbrake. What a quality piece of
software. Kudos to them to making it to 1.0 -- I hope to be using it for many
years to come. It's cool to see H265 support too. That's something I look
forward to trying out.

~~~
FabHK
Previous releases (0.10.something, maybe even 0.9?) already had H265 support,
IIRC, two years back or so.

And yes, great team.

------
pmarreck
I just downloaded it for the first time in a while 3 days ago and noticed that
H.265 exists and compresses twice as well at the same quality level... how in
the hell did I miss that? (VLC will play them). I did a test on a full-rez MKV
and worked great

~~~
LeonM
Most hardware video players (like Raspberry pi etc) can't decode H.265 using
hardware acceleration, a RPi 2 (haven't testen RPi3) does not have enough
computational power to play a FHD H.265 at 24FPS.

Until hardware H.265 decoding is introduced to the popular media center
hardware, H.264 will remain the codec of choice for most people.

~~~
snvzz
> Until hardware H.265 decoding is introduced to the popular media center
> hardware, H.264 will remain the codec of choice for most people.

Might never happen, thanks to netvc.

~~~
pmarreck
link to the netvc issue?

~~~
FullyFunctional
Not an "issue", but an effort, backed by many high profile players, not least
Google, Mozilla, and Cisco, to create an open, free, alternative:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NETVC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NETVC)

------
noobermin
I ask as someone who uses ffmpeg regularly, what does Handbrake offer over
ffmpeg?

~~~
kalleboo
How good is the ffmpeg AAC encoder these days? Ages ago when I started using
HandBrake, it using Apple's CoreAudio codec on Macs for the AAC encoding was a
big plus on the audio side.

~~~
rangibaby
libfdk_aac is fast and good

~~~
rockdoe
Which is not the default ffmpeg encoder, and due to licensing you can't
distribute libfdk_aac and x264 in the same ffmpeg binary.

There's a built-in ffmpeg AAC encoder too, but despite the author's claims it
is not as good as libfdk_aac.

And libfdk_aac itself isn't as good as Apple's AAC codec either. There's a
Hydrogenaudio listening test demonstrating that.

------
avitzurel
I stumbled upon this project about 2 months ago. Wanted to convert a bike race
video from avi to mp4.

It worked surprisingly well. Glad to see a new version of this released.

~~~
pixelfeeder
how was the speed?

~~~
nathan_f77
Pretty fast. He finished in third place.

------
dexterdog
Wow, I used to use this many years ago when ripping DVDs was a thing and also
for the occasional transcode to mkv. I had no idea it was still in
development. I'll have to check it out again.

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
Why transcode just to package media into an mkv container? Mkv is pretty much
codec agnostic, you could probably just steam copy. You'll save a lot of time
and audio-visual quality by doing so.

~~~
EvanAnderson
I transcode because H.264 saves me a lot of space over MPEG 2. I don't notice
the quality loss but I do notice the disk space and faster file transfers.

~~~
dexterdog
Also, most modern players are much faster at seeking through a proper mkv that
an old avi or a much larger file.

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
This is true indeed, mkv is a great container. The reason for my question was
that the OP appeared to be transcoding (a codec-level operation) just to
switch the container type. When it was mentioned that the transcode was to
convert from MPEG-2 to H.264, my question was answered. :)

------
nik736
What's the difference between this and FFMPEG?

~~~
mrswag
It has a nice GUI frontend with useful presets, understandable for the layman.
Very good tool for the people not too versed in CLI and/or video formats.

~~~
hashhar
Queue management (really great). Ability to extract titles from DVDs.

------
eliasbagley
Ah brings back memories of my college days when I would go to the library at
night when the computer labs were empty, check out a dozen dvds on 4 hour
loan, and use a separate computer to rip each one at the same time.

------
mrmondo
Fantastic software that I use almost weekly and have done so for many years.

------
marcstreeter
odd how checking for updates via Handbrake's in app update checker (is there
a better way to write that?) fails to see any newer version. So I had to get
it via their website. Meh.

------
jlgaddis
Great timing! I just built a new workstation over the last few days, put a
BluRay/DVD/CD writer in it, and am looking at the ~15 or so new movies we just
got over Christmas that I'm planning to rip. Gonna set up a "media PC" hooked
up to the TV to play our movies over the network.

------
Magnets
I've always found Xmedia recode to be a little easier if you want to change
advanced options

[http://www.xmedia-recode.de/en/](http://www.xmedia-recode.de/en/)

------
jsgo
I haven't upgraded in quite a while due to there being a shift at .15 I
believe it was where the AAC codec used had licensing issues (whether with the
library makers or in what the library makers were implementing). Only affected
Windows and Linux I believe. Is this still an issue? Is there a way to rebuild
it including the lost component(s) as I believe they mentioned at the time the
replacement was inferior?

------
grexe
What a really nice Christmas present from the HandBrake team! Kudos, it's my
favorite video transcoder since it's debut on BeOS back then...

------
floatboth
Finally, it supports VP9 and Opus!

------
UnoriginalGuy
I hope this fixes the issue I, but seemingly few others have, which is that
the sound drifts behind the video getting progressively worse as the video
continues.

By 60 minutes in the sound is a full five second behind the video.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Does this only happen when using variable bit rate audio, or does this happen
with fixed bit rate audio as well?

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Unfortunately both.

------
kccqzy
This was incredibly useful to me when I was still in high school. We used it
in lieu of Compressor (from Apple Final Cut Studio) and I remembered it was
quite a bit faster than Compressor.

------
merb
The only thing I found strange about HandBrake is the subtitles handling.
(Somes I can't just copy them 1:1)

For everything else I loved it.

------
johnnydoe9
Pretty cool, faster is now even faster. My dad can't tell the difference and I
have to encode stuff for him often

------
77pt77
How does this compare to say ogmrip?

I haven't used either in a long time and would appreciate the input.

------
dbarwick85
This is interesting information must share this

------
symlinkk
so i see that this is based on libav (ffmpeg libs). does anyone know of an up
to date tutorial on using libav? I want to write a music player and i've tried
to use libav but the documentation is almost non-existant

------
amq
If you're looking for something more advanced, have a look at MeGUI

------
qwertyuiop924
...Wait, it wasn't 1.0 already?

Could've fooled me...

~~~
mathgeek
Honestly, it already felt like a 1.0 product back when Netflix was a new
company.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
...Exactly.

------
eximius
I did not know it wasn't officially released yet. Really good stuff.

------
Hyperized
Don't use SHA-1 please.

~~~
JshWright
Verifying a downloaded file doesn't require a cryptographically secure hash
function...

~~~
aianus
Of course it does, otherwise a malicious mirror can (theoretically) work to
find a collision between their malware and the legitimate file and serve you
the former.

There's no good reason _not_ to use a secure hash function.

~~~
JshWright
If your threat model involves an attacker who is able to achieve a hash
collision while still implanting a sophisticated malware, you should probably
avoid downloading software from random websites...

------
babyrainbow
Great stuff.

