
Handbrake 0.10.0 released - chuckreynolds
https://handbrake.fr/news.php?article=27
======
rossy
> In addition, we have added the FDK AAC encoder for Windows and Linux as a
> optional compile-time option.

It's a shame that libfdk-aac is also GPL incompatible. It's hands down the
best free AAC encoder, but a version of FFmpeg/libav/Handbrake that's compiled
against it is not allowed to be distributed.

~~~
Igglyboo
would distributing a shell script that automated that install/compile process
be legal?

~~~
feld
Yes it's called FreeBSD ports :-)

(Not sure if this is an option, but could be easily added)

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e40
When I used Handbrake, I always had audio sync issues. I could never figure
out what I was doing wrong. That was on Windows. Now that I'm on a Mac,
perhaps it'll go better, though I don't have the need to use it much anymore.

~~~
gillianseed
I've never had any audio sync problems with Handbrake, then again I've never
done anything 'exotic' (basically encode my dvd's to x264+audio passthrough)
and everything has worked fine.

~~~
josteink
Back when you wanted to encode a DVD to the size of one (or maybe two) CDs,
having audio-passthrough was not an option. You typically re-encoded the data
from 384-448kbps (for AC3-surround) down to 128kbps stereo. For that you used
MP3 audio.

I also recall the earlier Frauenhofer MP3 codecs incorrectly reported audible
length of chunk-sizes (or something like that) causing incremental audio-skew
and sync-issues with the corresponding video the longer into the movie you
came.

It seemed impossible to fix and was terribly frustrating.

Eventually the tools caught up and patched up the data, or we got better tools
(like lame) which didn't produce the faulty artefacts to begin with.

Maybe this is what he's talking about, as the Frauenhofer MP3-codec was very
much a Windows-only thing.

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ulfw
"QSV is only supported on Windows" "libav AAC encoder as the new default for
Windows" "HandBrake now offers BiCubic scaling on Windows via OpenCL"

Sad that the Mac doesn't seem to get many of the goodies anymore.

~~~
astrange
OS X's built-in AAC encoder is the best available, so it doesn't need a
replacement.

On the other hand, QSV is entirely outclassed by x264 quality-wise, and I
could only recommend it for heat/battery power savings (useful for AirPlay
Mirroring, not so much for DVD backups).

It is odd that OpenCL programs wouldn't work, but that can't be much more, uh,
work.

I think the addition of NLMeans is interesting, since that filter is so slow
I've only ever used it for photo processing.

~~~
galad87
The OpenCL code works on mac too, but it's not available in th e GUI due to a
corner width/height case in which the downscale quality gets hideous.
HandBrake has got no active developer working on the OpenCL code anymore, so
it will stay as it is until someone comes and fixes it.

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quink
While still waiting for Daala I've already started encoding my videos in H.265
separately from handbrake, using mplayer. It's been going very well, H.265
will be awesome once it really starts hitting the mainstream. The bitrates are
magically small and x265 is pretty fast. mkv container and Opus audio.

~~~
voltagex_
I realise this is subjective but how's the quality of x265? What's the
encoding speed like in comparison to x264?

~~~
kristofferR
It's good for bitrate starved files, but x264 is actually still more efficient
for transparent encodes. x265 currently can't handle noise very well.

x265 is also much slower than x264, but it's getting faster all the time.

~~~
gillianseed
>It's good for bitrate starved files, but x264 is actually still more
efficient for transparent encodes. x265 currently can't handle noise very
well.

Yes this is my impression as well from the tests I've made.

>x265 is also much slower than x264, but it's getting faster all the time.

It will remain slower than x264 though, it uses more cpu consuming algorithms
in order to cram out more 'quality per bit', that said it likely has a lot of
performance improvements left to do.

~~~
xooyoozoo
>It will remain slower than x264 though, it uses more cpu consuming algorithms
in order to cram out more 'quality per bit'

At an abstract level, HEVC is AVC + refinement + new algorithms.

Conforming bitstreams aren't required to use all or even most features, so in
the long-term, I don't see why an HEVC encoder can't be a simple,
straightforward superset of x264 (i.e. same speed for same quality).

~~~
gillianseed
Sure, but the whole point behind x265 is to provide better quality per bit
than x264.

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Zeebrommer
At times I do need an audio/video converter, and it is always a bit of a pain
sifting trough all the dubious and low quality freeware programs. Although
Handbrake is not really dubious, last time I tried it wasn't very user
friendly or easy either. Anyone know why it seems to be hard to make a nice,
easy 'convert arbitrary format to something commonplace' program? And since
this gets upvoted, is Handbrake considered the current standard?

~~~
ubercow13
You could try just using ffmpeg (depending on your definition of easy). In
most instances it will simply be a case of something like

    
    
      ffmpeg -i input -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -c:a libfdk_aac output.mkv

~~~
Igglyboo
I second this, I bet most of those freeware programs are just shitty GUIs
around ffmpeg anyway. I doubt the developers of those programs care about GPL
violations either.

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jmnicolas
Handbrake could really use some TLC on the GUI. It's so confusing (at least
for me) that I was only using it in CLI mode. This ended up being a good thing
: I made a script to only convert at night when electricity is cheaper.

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Yadi
This is very interesting! I'm using AWS elastic transcoder, but this as an AMI
could be cool too, any thoughts on going that way?

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cheng1
Love the software.

However, still can't do batch convert on a OS? You can convert a whole folder
with a few clicks in the Windows version.

~~~
bphogan
Maybe I don't understand what you want to do, but for at least 3 years I've
been able to load a video clip in, set up the settings, add to queue, load
video, add to queue, repeat. Then process the whole queue overnight.

~~~
cheng1
You can add the whole folder at once and use that "Add all titles to queue"
button.

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higherpurpose
HandBrake uses HTTPS, but Sourceforge doesn't...great.

~~~
tokenizerrr
[https://handbrake.fr/checksums.php](https://handbrake.fr/checksums.php)

~~~
pokoleo
This ~prevents people from modifying the binary that you download, but doesn't
prevent them from knowing that you downloaded it.

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akerl_
You realize that HTTPS doesn't hide what sites you visit, of course?

~~~
JosephRedfern
But it hides the HTTP request itself - Sourceforge hosts thousands of
different projects, if served over HTTPS it'd be considerably harder to tell
which download had been requested.

~~~
dhbanes
I'm pretty sure an HTTPS GET request to
http[s]://iweb.dl.sourceforge.net/project/handbrake/0.10.0/HandBrake-0.10.0-MacOSX.6_GUI_x86_64.dmg
would be pretty easy to identify as a HandBrake download. The resource
requested is not hidden.

~~~
quesera
> The resource requested is not hidden.

Your GET request, and the server's reply, is encrypted.

The _hostname_ of your request might leak in SNI, or if your DNS lookup was
insecure.

It is also plausible that an eavesdropper could make a solid guess as to what
you downloaded by counting bytes, but that's obviously not worth much.

~~~
icebraining
_The hostname of your request might leak in SNI, or if your DNS lookup was
insecure._

You don't need a DNS leak; if you aren't using SNI, the server(s) replying on
that IP can only serve a single cert, so the snooper can usually find out the
hostname by simply connecting to it and seeing what it gets.

The exception is if the site is behind something like Cloudflare, which stuff
dozens or hundreds of hostnames in a single cert.

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xfalcox
Hey guys, someone has a good list of presets to share?

~~~
pkroll
You'll have to spend a great deal of time to beat the presets already used by
Handbrake/x264, and you'll only be able to do it on a particular clip. There's
a good article[1] on the presets and how they impact quality, which lead me to
using slow or slower for pretty much everything.

[1] [http://www.videoquality.pl/preset-settings-x264-quality-
comp...](http://www.videoquality.pl/preset-settings-x264-quality-compression-
speed-test/)

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jcslzr
VidCoder > Handbrake

~~~
KevinEldon
"VidCoder is a DVD/Blu-ray ripping and video transcoding application for
Windows. It uses HandBrake as its encoding engine." \-- 1st sentence on
VidCoder's site

I think you mean VidCoder has a better interface for HandBrake on Windows then
HandBrake? I haven't had any problems w/ HandBrake's UI on Windows, but I keep
it pretty simple so maybe if you want to do more complex things VidCoder is
better.

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1ris
Still no opus?

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marco1
XMedia Recode [1] can do all this as well. Looks quite similar as well, by the
way.

But of course, it's not open-source, while Handbrake is.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMedia_Recode](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMedia_Recode)

~~~
Zeebrommer
Experts estimate that there are approximately millions [0] of AV converters
around. At least, in my experience.

[0] not really

