Handbrake - ( Open Source)
Creating mp4 files or MKV DVD content is a very easy task with HandBrake.
HandBrake is mainly intended to generate MKV format from a DVD, or mp4 files. It allows to easily compress the DVD video from the hard disk including destination devices like iPod , iPhone, the PSP or AppleTV to standard MPEG-4 and MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) format. After detecting the source, the software interface has several tabs to adjust video parameters (codec, resolution, bitrate, approximate size of the video), audio ( track use, mixing), chapters in case of creation of a file that manages also advanced options for x264 files.
The software can use a choice of ffmpeg or XviD to encode the DVD. If the movie is on DVD, HandBrake will take care of the copy from the hard drive, but it may very well accept compress DVD already extracted to a folder. The video output format can be of MP4, AVI or OGM.
The application also allows to select one or two audio tracks. The encoding of these tracks can be made to AAC, MP3 or OGG format. It is possible to deinterlace the source, crop the image and of course resize or superimpose subtitles on the image.
HandBrake software has a clean and simple interface, being pretty easy to handle, but it can also be used for more advanced manipulation.
# All platforms
* General
- New online documentation at https://handbrake.fr/docs
- Completely overhauled the official presets:
* New general use presets for broad compatibility
* New device presets, now more up-to-date for common devices
* New web presets
* New Matroska (MKV) presets, including VP9 video with Opus audio
* Official presets from HandBrake 0.10.x are still available under "Legacy"
- New JSON-based preset system including command line support
- New JSON-based API for interacting with libhb
- Improvements to audio/video sync engine to better handle difficult sources
- Many miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements (over 1700 code commits!)
* Video
- VP9 video encoding via libvpx
- Intel QuickSync Video H.265/HEVC encoder
- Requires Intel Skylake or newer CPU
- Ultra HD / 4K color pass through (support for BT.2020)
- Additional standard frame rate selections in the graphical interfaces
- New Auto anamorphic mode maximizes storage resolution, replaces Strict anamorphic mode
- New Pad filter (command line only for now)
- New Decomb/Deinterlace filter settings and improved defaults
- Rotate filter now available in all graphical interfaces
- New NLMeans filter tunes Tape and Sprite for analog tape recordings and vintage video games, respectively
- Assembly optimizations NLMeans filter improve performance up to 10%
- Assembly optimizations in x264 encoder improve performance for faster presets by 5-10%
- x265 encoder quality improvements, especially when using tune grain
- High bit depth encoding support via external shared libraries (video pipeline is still 8-bit 4:2:0)
- x264 10-bit
- x265 10-bit and 12-bit
# Audio
- Opus audio encoding/decoding via libopus
- Passthru now supports E-AC-3, FLAC, and TrueHD audio formats
# Subtitles
- Improved subtitles rendering for some languages via HarfBuzz
- Miscellaneous subtitles improvements
# Command line interface
- Presets can now be imported and exported from the command line and are compatible with the graphical interfaces
- Queue exported from the graphical interfaces can now be imported by the command line interface (Linux and Windows only for now)
# Build system
- Add scripts to manually build and install Mac and MinGW-w64 (compile for Windows on Linux) toolchains
- Add support for multiple source URLs for third-party downloads
- Add SHA256 hash verification for third-party downloads
- Add configure parameter to disable or filter allowed third-party downloads (see configure --help)
- Use HTTPS everywhere; the few cases where a third-party does not provide packages over https, handbrake.fr does
- New targets on Mac to install and uninstall after building
- Add flatpak packaging support (experimental)
# Third-party libraries
* Updated libraries
- FreeType 2.6.5 (subtitles)
- Fontconfig 2.12.1 (subtitles)
- FriBidi 0.19.7 (subtitles)
- Libav 12 (encoding/decoding/muxing)
- libass 0.13.2 (subtitles)
- libbluray 0.9.3 (Blu-ray decoding)
- libmfx v6.0.0 (Intel QuickSync Video encoding/decoding)
- libvpx 1.5.0 (VP8/VP9 video encoding)
- x264 148 r2708 (H.264/AVC video encoding)
- x265 2.1 (H.265/HEVC video encoding)
- New libraries: HarfBuzz 1.3.0 (subtitles), libopus 1.1.3 (Opus audio encoding)
# Linux
- Add options for saving and loading queue files
- Removed system tray icon due to performance issues on Ubuntu
- Usability improvements
- Miscellaneous bug fixes
# Mac
- Updated all tooltips
- Added undo/redo support to the graphical interface
- Improved drag and drop support
- Added Open Recent to the File menu
- Added Add Titles to Queue... to the File menu (batch queueing)
- Preview prompts to open in an external application when the internal player does not support the format
- Preview now displays volume and audio/subtitles language selection during playback
- Picture and Filters settings are now part of the main window
- Settings are preserved when selecting a new title (instead of reloading the last selected preset)
- Improved support for importing/exporting comma-separated (.csv) chapter markers
- Queue is now automatically paused when available disk space is low
- When Done action can now be changed directly from the Queue window
- When Done notification is now interactive (reveals the encoded file in Finder)
- Activity Log window is now searchable (press "?"+"f" to activate)
- XQuartz is no longer required for subtitle burn-in
- Updated Sparkle software update library : Enabled DSA signature checking for improved security
- Usability improvements
- Miscellaneous bug fixes
# Windows
- Graphical interface now uses libhb directly, instead of sending commands to the command line interface:
* Encoding can now be paused and resumed
* Stopping encoding will finalize the partial file to be playable
- Reduced installer and install size:
* The command line interface is no longer included in the graphical interface installer
- Update checker now verifies the signature of the update file for improved security
- Added support for quality-based audio encoding
- Added ability to import tab-separated (.tsv), XML (.xml), and plain text (.txt) chapter markers
- Improved the "configure default" options for audio and subtitles:
* Default audio track behavior is now configurable
* Subtitles burn-in behavior is now configurable
- Removed DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) hardware-accelerated video decoding:
* Was causing many issues without providing sufficient improvement to decoding efficiency
* May be added again at a later date if performance and stability improves
- Usability improvements
- Miscellaneous bug fixes