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HandBrake 1.0.0 Released

780 points by bomanbot 10y ago

avitzurel 10y ago
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 10y ago
  how was the speed?
  - nathan_f77 10y ago
    Pretty fast. He finished in third place.
adim86 10y ago
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!
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  You develop and test as fast as you have time to. HandBrake probably does not bring money to its developers, so the pace is inherently limited.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    It's not necessarily about the pace. Some 0.x software is more feature complete than other 1.x software. It's not possible to compare versions between different pieces of software to infer anything meaningful about how much work went into them. To give an example, it took VLC a long time to reach version 1, yet even in its 0.x releases it was amongst the best video players available (in terms of features, performance and stability), better than many other closed-source competitors with higher version numbers. In other words, aside from libraries and programming languages (where major version numbers do have extra significance), version numbers are only loosely coupled to software quality.
- stuaxo 10y ago
  Lots of open source takes 10 years to hit 1.0. Though 1.0 usually has a different meaning in both world's. 1.0 usually includes a set of features the project had in mind at the beginning in open source. Whereas in closed source it usually means the first version that works to a minimal extent. Closed source 1.0 equals open source 0 point something.
  - spacemanmatt 10y ago
    I generally take version numbers near 1 to be market communication about stability/fitness. Above that, I take version numbers as a loose grouping of significant change sets.
- bluejekyll 10y ago
  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.
  - dvdhnt 10y ago
    I can generally agree with this save for two cases. One, I've found that major bumps in a programming language are significant, especially in the case of something like python 2 vs 3. Second, a lot of major javascript players have been using major bumps mainly in the case of breaking APIs, removing functionality, etc (ex: Lodash, ExpressJS, and - soon - React). Contrarily, I've noticed in Rails that A LOT of major refactoring and functionality has been added via minor bumps that, while still backwards compatible for Rails itself, often breaks custom implementations, usually related to javascript modules and configs. Overall, though, I agree with you.
  - alephnil 10y ago
    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.
mrmondo 10y ago
Fantastic software that I use almost weekly and have done so for many years.
junto 10y ago
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 10y ago
  An iPad can't play regular MP4/H264 videos by default?
  - evgen 10y ago
    It can, but you can optimize the encoding so that the iPad needs to do less work playing the video.
  - slhck 10y ago
    Not all of them, at least. There are some restrictions with regard to profiles and levels that are supported (i.e. bells and whistles that the codec can use).
- pilif 10y ago
  You could use youtube-dl and request the content in an iPad compatible format. It would save you the waiting time for the transcoding
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Veratyr 10y ago
  If you get YouTube Red (which also saves the kids from ads), you also get offline support built into the mobile app. Just in case you weren't aware.
forinti 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Yes, the absurd of piracy warnings is ridiculous Really makes me think twice about giving them my money
  - fredley 10y ago
    Nothing makes me want to go out and pirate something purely as an act of defiance than unskippable piracy warnings.
    - dvdhnt 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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.
    - cm2187 10y ago
      But mostly, it annoys people who actually purchased the disc!
nik736 10y ago
What's the difference between this and FFMPEG?
- mrswag 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Queue management (really great). Ability to extract titles from DVDs.
babyrainbow 10y ago
Great stuff.
noobermin 10y ago
I ask as someone who uses ffmpeg regularly, what does Handbrake offer over ffmpeg?
- pmorici 10y ago
  Ease of use and easy installation on windows.
- 0x006A 10y ago
  - it supports extracting titles from dvd and blu ray - a gui
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  If you are comfortable with ffmpeg and shell scripting you probably don't need Handbrake. It's basically a nice UI.
  - 0x006A 10y ago
    ffmpeg has no support for dvd titles or chapters.
- Ronsenshi 10y ago
  I've used to work with a team that used HandBrake for transcoding - from what one of the developers told me HandBrake handles weird video formats better. Some of the videos would have troubles with ffmpeg which would produce "broken" transcoded videos, videos without audio and some other issues that I don't remember now. Myself personally, I feel quite comfortable with ffmpeg and I never had any problems with it so whenever I can I use it.
  - AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
    The issues you bring up are not deficiencies with ffmpeg, but rather the user. One can prevent all of the issues you cited with the correct ffmpeg commands and an understanding of how media codecs and containers work.
Hyperized 10y ago
Don't use SHA-1 please.
- JshWright 10y ago
  Verifying a downloaded file doesn't require a cryptographically secure hash function...
  - feld 10y ago
    well it does require one that can't have collisions. otherwise what's the point in "verifying"?
    - mschulze 10y ago
      There is no hash function that can't have collisions by definition.
      - feld 10y ago
        *isn't known to have collisions, then
  - aianus 10y ago
    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.
    - verbify 10y ago
      It would be pretty impressive, as they'd need their malware to both do what they want and exactly match that hash. Not impossible, just clever.
    - JshWright 10y ago
      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...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dexterdog 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      Also, most modern players are much faster at seeking through a proper mkv that an old avi or a much larger file.
      - AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
        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. :)
weisser 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
bsharitt 10y ago
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.
- mortenjorck 10y ago
  I keep Handbrake around even without optical drives - although it's been a few years since I last ripped a disc, it's still easily the best general-purpose encoding tool I've used. Nothing else really approaches its combination of reliable, high-quality output, fast performance, and uncluttered UI.
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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
- xenomachina 10y ago
  My annoyance with HandBrake was that it requires so many clicks to rip all the videos from a disc while preserving all audio and subtitle tracks. My kids have a bunch of DVDs where several TV episodes are stored as a single title with chapter separators. Getting HandBrake to split them up was also kind of a pain in the GUI. I ended up making a wrapper for HandBrakeCLI to simplify this: https://github.com/xenomachina/dvdrip https://github.com/xenomachina/dvdrip
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
...Wait, it wasn't 1.0 already? Could've fooled me...
- mathgeek 10y ago
  Honestly, it already felt like a 1.0 product back when Netflix was a new company.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    ...Exactly.
pmarreck 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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 10y ago
      link to the netvc issue?
      - FullyFunctional 10y ago
        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
- rockdoe 10y ago
  H.265 only compresses twice as much as H.264 in marketing materials, or when not comparing to x264. It is trivial to change the defaults to give half the bitrate but you will not get the same quality.
pulse7 10y ago
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...
- dvdhnt 10y ago
  That's actually super interesting! I honestly wish I knew more about RAM to understand how that one process exposed the bug. :(
  - pulse7 10y ago
    MemTest86 showed me my RAM is defect at exactly 1 bit: whatever you wrote to this bit, you got 0 back. During video conversion HandBrake used this part of RAM and could not cope with false data read from RAM... and froze... Since I used this machine to backup my data on DVDs I got many errors in my data on backup. But since I had a copy of everything on another HDD I throw the DVDs away and backed up everything again (after replacing defective RAM module and reinstalling OS and SW on my machine).
    - j1vms 10y ago
      > HandBrake used this part of RAM and could not cope with false data read from RAM Which in itself alludes to the encoding stream itself (or one of the intermediate streams during the encoding process) having some form of strong channel coding - in error detection - either by design or not. Detect 1-bit error in a gig+ stream, perhaps without easily being able to locate it, beyond saying it's in such or such chunk (the current frame(s) being processed).
- brownbat 10y ago
  Amazing. These are like Bill Brasky stories or Schneier facts. If Handbrake fails, it's only because your hardware is broken.
  - KevinEldon 10y ago
UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Does this only happen when using variable bit rate audio, or does this happen with fixed bit rate audio as well?
  - UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
    Unfortunately both.
brownbat 10y ago
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: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 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:b1Dmiou... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obpyt_tYxCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obpyt_tYxCU
- aw3c2 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    What's the best software for lossless archival ripping?
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      This is an interesting one, in that most data on DVDs is already stored in lossy formats (such as MPEG-2 for video https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video ). The best form of preservation is to rip the contents as a DVD ISO, which will use the same video and audio formats, as well as preserving extra features like the DVD menus. Any DVD ripper that can rip to a DVD ISO format and perform checksums on the ripped contents will suffice.
      - eltoozero 10y ago
NelsonMinar 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    > 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 10y ago
      > 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.
eximius 10y ago
I did not know it wasn't officially released yet. Really good stuff.
dperfect 10y ago
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
jlgaddis 10y ago
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.
gigatexal 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Previous releases (0.10.something, maybe even 0.9?) already had H265 support, IIRC, two years back or so. And yes, great team.
amq 10y ago
If you're looking for something more advanced, have a look at MeGUI
symlinkk 10y ago
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
Magnets 10y ago
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/
77pt77 10y ago
How does this compare to say ogmrip? I haven't used either in a long time and would appreciate the input.
marcstreeter 10y ago
odd how checking for updates via Handbrake's in app update checker (is there a better way to write that?) fails to see any newer version. So I had to get it via their website. Meh.
floatboth 10y ago
Finally, it supports VP9 and Opus!
topcomfort 10y ago
http://www.topcomfort.com.ua http://www.topcomfort.com.ua
grexe 10y ago
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...
jsgo 10y ago
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?
eliasbagley 10y ago
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.
johnnydoe9 10y ago
Pretty cool, faster is now even faster. My dad can't tell the difference and I have to encode stuff for him often
kccqzy 10y ago
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 10y ago
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.
dbarwick85 10y ago
This is interesting information must share this

780 points by bomanbot 10y ago

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 10y ago
how was the speed?
- nathan_f77 10y ago
  Pretty fast. He finished in third place.

adim86 10y ago

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!

marcosdumay 10y ago
You develop and test as fast as you have time to. HandBrake probably does not bring money to its developers, so the pace is inherently limited.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  It's not necessarily about the pace. Some 0.x software is more feature complete than other 1.x software. It's not possible to compare versions between different pieces of software to infer anything meaningful about how much work went into them. To give an example, it took VLC a long time to reach version 1, yet even in its 0.x releases it was amongst the best video players available (in terms of features, performance and stability), better than many other closed-source competitors with higher version numbers. In other words, aside from libraries and programming languages (where major version numbers do have extra significance), version numbers are only loosely coupled to software quality.
stuaxo 10y ago
Lots of open source takes 10 years to hit 1.0. Though 1.0 usually has a different meaning in both world's. 1.0 usually includes a set of features the project had in mind at the beginning in open source. Whereas in closed source it usually means the first version that works to a minimal extent. Closed source 1.0 equals open source 0 point something.
- spacemanmatt 10y ago
  I generally take version numbers near 1 to be market communication about stability/fitness. Above that, I take version numbers as a loose grouping of significant change sets.
bluejekyll 10y ago
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.
- dvdhnt 10y ago
  I can generally agree with this save for two cases. One, I've found that major bumps in a programming language are significant, especially in the case of something like python 2 vs 3. Second, a lot of major javascript players have been using major bumps mainly in the case of breaking APIs, removing functionality, etc (ex: Lodash, ExpressJS, and - soon - React). Contrarily, I've noticed in Rails that A LOT of major refactoring and functionality has been added via minor bumps that, while still backwards compatible for Rails itself, often breaks custom implementations, usually related to javascript modules and configs. Overall, though, I agree with you.
- alephnil 10y ago
  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.

mrmondo 10y ago

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

junto 10y ago

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 10y ago
An iPad can't play regular MP4/H264 videos by default?
- evgen 10y ago
  It can, but you can optimize the encoding so that the iPad needs to do less work playing the video.
- slhck 10y ago
  Not all of them, at least. There are some restrictions with regard to profiles and levels that are supported (i.e. bells and whistles that the codec can use).
pilif 10y ago
You could use youtube-dl and request the content in an iPad compatible format. It would save you the waiting time for the transcoding
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Veratyr 10y ago
If you get YouTube Red (which also saves the kids from ads), you also get offline support built into the mobile app. Just in case you weren't aware.

forinti 10y ago

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 10y ago
Yes, the absurd of piracy warnings is ridiculous Really makes me think twice about giving them my money
- fredley 10y ago
  Nothing makes me want to go out and pirate something purely as an act of defiance than unskippable piracy warnings.
  - dvdhnt 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
  - cm2187 10y ago
    But mostly, it annoys people who actually purchased the disc!

nik736 10y ago

What's the difference between this and FFMPEG?

mrswag 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Queue management (really great). Ability to extract titles from DVDs.

babyrainbow 10y ago

Great stuff.

noobermin 10y ago

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

pmorici 10y ago
Ease of use and easy installation on windows.
0x006A 10y ago
- it supports extracting titles from dvd and blu ray - a gui
maxxxxx 10y ago
If you are comfortable with ffmpeg and shell scripting you probably don't need Handbrake. It's basically a nice UI.
- 0x006A 10y ago
  ffmpeg has no support for dvd titles or chapters.
Ronsenshi 10y ago
I've used to work with a team that used HandBrake for transcoding - from what one of the developers told me HandBrake handles weird video formats better. Some of the videos would have troubles with ffmpeg which would produce "broken" transcoded videos, videos without audio and some other issues that I don't remember now. Myself personally, I feel quite comfortable with ffmpeg and I never had any problems with it so whenever I can I use it.
- AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
  The issues you bring up are not deficiencies with ffmpeg, but rather the user. One can prevent all of the issues you cited with the correct ffmpeg commands and an understanding of how media codecs and containers work.

Hyperized 10y ago

Don't use SHA-1 please.

JshWright 10y ago
Verifying a downloaded file doesn't require a cryptographically secure hash function...
- feld 10y ago
  well it does require one that can't have collisions. otherwise what's the point in "verifying"?
  - mschulze 10y ago
    There is no hash function that can't have collisions by definition.
    - feld 10y ago
      *isn't known to have collisions, then
- aianus 10y ago
  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.
  - verbify 10y ago
    It would be pretty impressive, as they'd need their malware to both do what they want and exactly match that hash. Not impossible, just clever.
  - JshWright 10y ago
    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...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dexterdog 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Also, most modern players are much faster at seeking through a proper mkv that an old avi or a much larger file.
    - AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
      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. :)

weisser 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

bsharitt 10y ago

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.

mortenjorck 10y ago
I keep Handbrake around even without optical drives - although it's been a few years since I last ripped a disc, it's still easily the best general-purpose encoding tool I've used. Nothing else really approaches its combination of reliable, high-quality output, fast performance, and uncluttered UI.
blisterpeanuts 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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
xenomachina 10y ago
My annoyance with HandBrake was that it requires so many clicks to rip all the videos from a disc while preserving all audio and subtitle tracks. My kids have a bunch of DVDs where several TV episodes are stored as a single title with chapter separators. Getting HandBrake to split them up was also kind of a pain in the GUI. I ended up making a wrapper for HandBrakeCLI to simplify this: https://github.com/xenomachina/dvdrip https://github.com/xenomachina/dvdrip

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

...Wait, it wasn't 1.0 already? Could've fooled me...

mathgeek 10y ago
Honestly, it already felt like a 1.0 product back when Netflix was a new company.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  ...Exactly.

pmarreck 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    link to the netvc issue?
    - FullyFunctional 10y ago
      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
rockdoe 10y ago
H.265 only compresses twice as much as H.264 in marketing materials, or when not comparing to x264. It is trivial to change the defaults to give half the bitrate but you will not get the same quality.

pulse7 10y ago

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...

dvdhnt 10y ago
That's actually super interesting! I honestly wish I knew more about RAM to understand how that one process exposed the bug. :(
- pulse7 10y ago
  MemTest86 showed me my RAM is defect at exactly 1 bit: whatever you wrote to this bit, you got 0 back. During video conversion HandBrake used this part of RAM and could not cope with false data read from RAM... and froze... Since I used this machine to backup my data on DVDs I got many errors in my data on backup. But since I had a copy of everything on another HDD I throw the DVDs away and backed up everything again (after replacing defective RAM module and reinstalling OS and SW on my machine).
  - j1vms 10y ago
    > HandBrake used this part of RAM and could not cope with false data read from RAM Which in itself alludes to the encoding stream itself (or one of the intermediate streams during the encoding process) having some form of strong channel coding - in error detection - either by design or not. Detect 1-bit error in a gig+ stream, perhaps without easily being able to locate it, beyond saying it's in such or such chunk (the current frame(s) being processed).
brownbat 10y ago
Amazing. These are like Bill Brasky stories or Schneier facts. If Handbrake fails, it's only because your hardware is broken.
- KevinEldon 10y ago

UnoriginalGuy 10y ago

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 10y ago
Does this only happen when using variable bit rate audio, or does this happen with fixed bit rate audio as well?
- UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
  Unfortunately both.

brownbat 10y ago

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: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 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:b1Dmiou... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obpyt_tYxCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obpyt_tYxCU

aw3c2 10y ago
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 10y ago
  What's the best software for lossless archival ripping?
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    This is an interesting one, in that most data on DVDs is already stored in lossy formats (such as MPEG-2 for video https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video ). The best form of preservation is to rip the contents as a DVD ISO, which will use the same video and audio formats, as well as preserving extra features like the DVD menus. Any DVD ripper that can rip to a DVD ISO format and perform checksums on the ripped contents will suffice.
    - eltoozero 10y ago

NelsonMinar 10y ago

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 10y ago
> 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 10y ago
  > 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 10y ago
    > 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.

eximius 10y ago

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

dperfect 10y ago

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

jlgaddis 10y ago

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.

gigatexal 10y ago

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 10y ago
Previous releases (0.10.something, maybe even 0.9?) already had H265 support, IIRC, two years back or so. And yes, great team.

amq 10y ago

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

symlinkk 10y ago

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

Magnets 10y ago

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/

77pt77 10y ago

How does this compare to say ogmrip? I haven't used either in a long time and would appreciate the input.

marcstreeter 10y ago

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

floatboth 10y ago

Finally, it supports VP9 and Opus!

topcomfort 10y ago

http://www.topcomfort.com.ua http://www.topcomfort.com.ua

grexe 10y ago

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...

jsgo 10y ago

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?

eliasbagley 10y ago

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.

johnnydoe9 10y ago

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

kccqzy 10y ago

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 10y ago

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.

dbarwick85 10y ago

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