HandBrake

HandBrake 0.9.3: Released!

"The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything."

Download it now.

Sorry it's been so long, but we think you'll all agree this release of HandBrake was worth the wait. Where to begin?

HandBrake is no longer limited to DVDs: it will now accept practically any type of video as a source. This massive enhancement was achieved by tapping into the power of libavcodec and libavformat from the FFmpeg project.

There is now an official GTK graphical interface for Linux, available as a binary for Ubuntu. This is the real deal, interacting directly with HandBrake's core library instead of just putting a pretty face on a command line interface. It has full feature parity with the Mac interface.

The x264 project has really come into its own this year, and HandBrake 0.9.3 integrates the latest improvements to the H.264 encoding library. Picture quality has enhanced dramatically through the use of psychovisual rate distortion and adaptive quantization, and there have been significant speed optimizations.

HandBrake now offers total control over multiple audio tracks.

HandBrake will dynamically load VLC's copy of libdvdcss if you have it in your Applications folder in Mac OS X, and if you're on Linux, and you want to live on the wild side, you can install libdvdcss on your system and get the same effect.

Translation of the last paragraph from nerdese:

We're not about to stop you from choosing to decrypt DVDs. If you're on a Mac, and you have VLC 0.9.x installed, you won't even notice the internal capability's gone. If you're on Linux, all you have to do is install a library.

When queueing up a bunch of videos to encode, you need no longer fear a crash in HandBrake's graphical interfaces. Queued jobs are cached to disk for safekeeping between sessions.

The presets are now "nested" in folders and have evolved. Notably, there is a new Apple "Universal" preset, designed to play and look good doing so on anything from an iPod Nano to an AppleTV.

There have been many changes to most of them. Please be aware that most presets now use different settings. This means most of them are not suited for benchmarking 0.9.3 against 0.9.2. For example, the AppleTV preset is slower because it is now quality based, and produces much more efficient output. The Normal preset uses psychovisual rate distortion. The High Profile presets use psychovisual trellising. All of these setting changes can influence encoding time and output file size.

For comparison purposes, there are several presets in the Apple->Legacy folder (the old iPod High-Rez, the old AppleTV, and the old iPhone presets) which remain unchanged since 0.9.2.

HandBrake should now keep lip-synch as well as a DVD player can.

HandBrake now offers a decomb filter, in the style of AviSynth's. It is a deinterlacer that can be left on all the time without degrading picture quality, because it only deinterlaces video when it visibly needs to be.

The "Slow" and "Slower" filters, as well as the new decomb filter, will now take advantage of as many processors as you can throw at them.

HandBrake now, by default, passes through the exact video framerate of the source instead of smoothing to a constant rate, which could lead to frames being duplicated or dropped.

HandBrake now can encode video using the Theora codec.

Besides x264, updated libraries include libsamplerate, libogg, xvidcore, libmpeg2, lame, faac, and ffmpeg's libavcodec, libavformat, and libswscale.

As hard as it might be to believe, the changes listed above are only the tip of the iceberg. A much longer list is available, but even that is only a brief summary. There have been well over 600 changes to HandBrake's code base since 0.9.2, including hundreds of bug fixes, and a thorough log can be found on the Trac.

HandBrake 0.9.2: Released!

"I spent my refund on a digital TV with Surround Sound. It's got headphones, so I can watch Steven Seagal films without bothering Bonnie. Yes! Lock and load! Bring on the pain!"

HandBrake 0.9.2 incorporates many major and exciting changes—including full support for the AppleTV Take 2 and the latest iPhone/iPod Touch firmware. Mac users take note: this release is only compatible with Mac OS X Leopard, 10.5.

Download it now.

Apple fans will be delighted over:

• Dolby Digital 5.1 (AC3) sound in MP4 files, for a true DVD experience on the AppleTV and in Perian.
• Multi-track audio support for Apple devices
• iPhone-compatible anamorphic video at its full size

Power users will find:

• Variable frame rate encoding with detelecine filtering
• More flexible, "loose" anamorphic video
• MP4 optimization for progressive web downloads
• Dynamic range compression for encoding from AC3 audio
• Robust program and transport stream support

Speed freaks will squee at:

• A fresher, faster version of x264
• Tuning of FIFO sizes by processor count

And everyone should enjoy the increased stability brought by:

• Better handling of audio discontinuities
• Better handling of DVD read errors
• Work-arounds for missing end-of-cell markers
• Recovery when streams have signal loss
• Better synced chapter markers
• Better handling of B-Frames
• No more cutting off the very ends of films
• No more lost subtitles or chapter markers
• No more crashes in 2-pass encoding

As always, the complete list of changes is available on the Trac, as well as a complete timeline of 0.9.2's development.

HandBrake 0.9.1: Released!

"Mistakes? We don't make mistakes."

We're chagrined to announce the public release of HandBrake 0.9.1. Why chagrined? Because 0.9.0 wasn't as stable as it should have been, something 0.9.1 rectifies.

Download it now.

This minor update squashes a number of glaring bugs. Most notably, HandBrake will no longer hang at the end of encoding MKV files with chapter markers. This means the Animation, Bedlam, Constant Quality Rate, Deux Six Quatre, Film, and Television presets are now usable.

Additional improvements:

• Impressive performance enhancements
• Significant interface prettification (Mac more than Win)
• Color subtitles now show up in color
• Changing dimensions in Picture Settings no longer causes a crash (Mac)
• Forced subtitle support
• More robust exception handling (Win)
• Closing the main window no longer causes HandBrake to crash (Mac)
• Using "Slow" deinterlacing no longer doubles the chapter count.
• MPEG Stream support is now case-insensitive (.VOB as well as .vob, etc) and more compatible
• No more error messages sent to standard out instead of standard error
• Bigger buffer for the activity log (Mac)
• Proper display of fading subtitles
• On-completion options to shutdown, suspend, etc (Win)
• "Same as source FPS" now works correctly when the end-credits of a progressive film are interlaced.
• Add-to-queue fixed (Win)
• Target size fixed for the umpteenth time (Mac)

...and assorted other changes.

As always, for the complete list of changes, see the Trac.

Another day, another facelift

NOTE: A problem with the Trac RSS feed URL was identified and fixed shortly after this theme was applied.

Thanks to the tremendous work by an anonymous contributor, the HandBrake blog got a facelift for hlscript! The site is now leaner (with a 30% reduction in HTML), prettier, and better than ever!

New (old?) look

For about a year now, the HandBrake blog/front page/RSS feed have been provided via WordPress, an open-source blog tool that provides amazing ease-of-use and fresh appearance at the expense of very high RAM and CPU requirements on busy sites.

As a result of this, many of you have noticed that especially during release periods, the site gets painfully slow (and occasionally goes down altogether).

In an attempt to combat this, we have redesigned the news portion of the site using an infrastructure called hlscript that provides much of the same functionality with far less resource requirements.

We hope that you like the new look - it is something of a blend of the "classic" HandBrake blog look (from over a year ago) and the WordPress K2 theme that was graciously provided to us by Hawkman.

The most critical elements of the old site - the Downloads page, the Documentation page, and the RSS feeds - have had redirects set up so that the old links should still work on the new site. If you discover anything broken or any often-used links that still need to be redirected, please let us know on the General discussion forum.

Thank you for your continued support and interest in HandBrake!

HandBrake 0.9.0 Released!

Known issue in 0.9.0: Putting chapter markers in the MKV container causes a lockup at the end of the encode and results in an unusable file. We apologize for this inconvenience, which will be rectified in 0.9.1.

"But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

We're proud to announce the public release of HandBrake 0.9.0.

Download it now.

This is a major release. The changes cannot really all be summed up, but here's a try:

• User experience is improved through a re-envisioned Mac interface and a Windows interface that's been rebuilt from the ground up.
• Picture quality is improved through better image scaling, better deinterlacing, new filters for denoising, deblocking, inverse telecine, and new presets devoted to high quality settings.
• Speed improvements due to updated copies of x264 and ffmpeg. This includes improved multi-threaded encoding for the iPod.
• Compatibility is improved through new presets for devices like the iPhone and PSP. As well, HandBrake now supports DTS as an audio source and has limited support for .VOB and .TS file containers as input. Most excitingly, HandBrake can now output to the Matroska (MKV) file container.
• Stability has been improved due to countless bug fixes. (Including audio drop and mp2 issues). Handbrake also has optional support for MP4 files larger than 4 gigabytes.

This is only a short summary of 121 days of furious activity, during which nearly 300 changes were made to the code base. For details, you can see a timeline of all changes.

If you're curious why this release is being called 0.9.0, please see the FAQ.

Enjoy!

Signs of Life

It's been over one hundred days since the last public beta of HandBrake. Back then, I promised that "a second beta of 0.8.5 will follow this one, with a number of other exciting features." Well. It's been over 3 months. Where's the next release?

It's coming.

No, really!

A number of bugs have been solved. Some minor (like multiple audio tracks playing at once in QuickTime, or presets losing their "magic sauce" if you changed any settings)...some major (no more audio drops and no more audio choppiness or ballooning log files with discs from stand-alone DVD recorders).

But you know how once software goes "beta" there's supposed to be a feature-freeze? No one ever told us that =)

We've added more presets, including ones for the iPhone and PSP. We've made countless changes to the Mac GUI including adding Growl notifications and debug logging -- not to mention a swanky new unified toolbar. We've rewritten the Windows front-end in C#. We've got chapter naming. We've got support for files larger than 4 gigs. We've got faster iPod encoding and the latest optimizations for x264.

But wait, there's more!

Here's a list of acronyms and abbreviations that should make any nerd drool, and there's all coming soon, in the next release of HandBrake:

DTS,MKV,TS,MPG,VOB,IVTC,HQDN3D,YADIF,MCDEINT,PP7,SWS

Hmm...maybe we'll find a better name for this than "0.8.5b2"...

Be seeing you.

HandBrake 0.8.5b1 Released

"I don't want to go on the cart! I feel fine. I... feel... happy!"

After a 14-month hiatus, a brand new development team, a project forked then unforked, and literally hundreds of revisions...

We are pleased to announce the release of HandBrake 0.8.5b1!

This new version of HandBrake encompasses everything that was in MediaFork 0.8.0b1 and much, much, much more.

Download HandBrake 0.8.5b1

• For Mac OS X (Graphical, 10.4 or newer)
• For Linux (Command-line)
• For Windows (Command-line)
• For Windows (Graphical)
• For Mac OS X (Command-line, 10.3.9 or newer)
• Source code

The complete change set is available and well worth a read (PDF), but here's a summary for the impatient:

• User presets (Mac)
• AppleTV and PS3 support
• Anamorphic, even in QuickTime
• Surround sound (both AAC 5.1 and Dolby Pro Logic II)
• Chapter markers (QuickTime-style)
• Official support for the Windows GUI
• PPC Linux support
• High profile H.264

A number of bugs have been fixed as well, including the restoration of multiple audio tracks. Still, keep in mind that this is a beta, and no particular level of stability or usability is guaranteed; don't delete your copy of HandBrake 0.7.1 just yet.

Following the release of MediaFork 0.8.0b1, we were overwhelmed by new users. Fortunately, with them came new coders! A year ago, there were 2 developers. Now, there are over a dozen. Thanks to this happy development, HandBrake's future is full and bright. So stay tuned: a second beta of 0.8.5 will follow this one, with a number of other exciting features.

A HandBrake and open source primer

For those itching for a new feature in HandBrake, I would strongly recommend you read this post prior to making the request. I think you'll find it helpful in learning about our project, and the open source culture in general. Please consider it a must-read prior to making any feature requests.

...and then there was one

I am proud to announce that HandBrake and MediaFork have now officially joined as one. Many thanks to titer and the entire MediaFork development and support staff for making this possible.

The next public beta release will be called HandBrake - most likely, version 0.9.0 beta 1 (reflecting the many new features that will be available). This is expected to be released in the next 2-3 weeks.

I would like to sincerely thank our developers, beta testers, support staff, Donovan at CityNet, and above all titer for all of the work they've done to make the transition possible. Thank you all very much!