There’s an old proverb in the video encoding world: “Speed, size, quality: pick two.” It means that you always have to make a trade-off between the time it takes to encode a video, the amount of compression used, and the picture quality. Well, this release of HandBrake refuses to compromise. It picks all three.
A large portion of these speed, size, and quality improvements come to us for free, from the x264 project. The past year, like every year, has seen some massive improvements for that video encoding engine. As always, it has been further hand-optimized for better performance. But it has also gained new features like macroblock tree rate control and weighted P-Frame prediction. The end result? Better picture quality, at a smaller size, faster.
HandBrake has a new, much improved compilation system, which allows easy 64-bit and parallel builds, as well as providing easy extendability for future improvements to the application. 64-bit builds tend to perform approximately 10% better than their 32-bit brethren.
HandBrake now uses a better DVD reading library called libdvdnav. This means it can now read some DVDs it had trouble with before, and it can also select different angles on a DVD. As well, some bugs in underlying libraries have been patched.
As we’ve had on our roadmap for quite awhile now, one of our goals for version 0.9.4 was to refocus on HandBrake’s key strengths and to remove dead weight. As part of this process, several containers and a codec have been removed from HandBrake.
AVI: AVI is a rough beast. It is obsolete. It does not support modern container features like chapters, muxed-in subtitles, variable framerate video, or out of order frame display. Furthermore, HandBrake’s AVI muxer is vanilla AVI 1.0 that doesn’t even support large files. The code has not been actively maintained since 2005. Keeping it in the library while implementing new features means a very convoluted data pipeline, full of conditionals that make the code more difficult to read and maintain, and make output harder to predict. As such, it is now gone. It is not coming back, and good riddance.
OGG/OGM: HandBrake’s OGM muxer is just as out of date. It hasn’t been actively maintained in years either, and it too lacks support for HandBrake’s best features. It requires conditionals to work around missing functionality too…only this one gets tested so infrequently the conditionals were never even put in the code, so it just fails when you try to do anything advanced. This one is not coming back either. And yes, we’re aware of HTML 5. For patent-free muxing, HandBrake still has Matroska, which is a much better container anyway.
XviD: HandBrake, these days, is almost entirely about H.264 video, aka MPEG-4 Part 10. This makes it rather…superfluous to include two different encoders for an older codec, MPEG-4 Part 2. When choosing between FFmpeg’s and XviD’s, it came down to a matter of necessity. We need to include libavcodec (FFmpeg) for a bunch of other parts of its API, like decoding. Meanwhile, XviD’s build system causes grief (it’s the most common support query we get about compiling, after x264’s requirement of yasm). Since we mainly use MPEG-4 Part 2 for testing/debugging, and recommend only H.264 for high quality encodes, Xvid’s undisputed quality edge over FFmpeg’s encoder is inconsequential, while FFmpeg’s speed edge over XviD is important to us.
Mac users can now encode AAC audio using OS X’s Core Audio, rather than using the open source libfaac. Core Audio offers far superior audio quality.
More info and download link here.
h.264 support is sufficient for me. They could drop .avi, OGG/OGM & Xvid support and I wouldn’t miss it at all.
All those thieves, i mean rippers, should be happy
>> All those thieves, i mean rippers, should be happy
Yes, we are
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I’m not a thief if I’m ripping a DVD I own so I can watch it on my iPhone.
people who use Handbrake are theives? oh shit, i better go talk to the police about using Handbrake to copy my dvds to my iPhone
Loving the new Handbrake!!!! A huge thanks to it’s developer team.
There is no moral wrong in backing up your own DVDs.
Scratch happens.
Jim,
Why do you consider it theft if I want to back up a disc or convert for use on other devices. I do not sell my burns. They are for me or my immediate family. I would gladly pay an extra buck or even two for a transferable copy. But the Movie Conglomerates only include a copy on the ‘Extras’ disc, meaning the consumer has to pay $5-7 more. I’ve bought movies from iTunes even though the quality is disappointing on a bigger screen, and I’ve paid the extra cash for movies with digital copies. But older movies? I don’t think so. Film distributors are going the route of the music industry by note staying ahead of this issue. I’d prefer not to waste my computing time and resources burning backups. But the price of avoiding that has to be more reasonable.
If it’s not available for a matte screen, I don’t want it.
is the 64 bit VLC available yet for Snow Leopard?
LOL @ Scot Murphy
HazMatt
@rw VLC 1.0.2 is 64 bit and works under Snow Leopard. for some reason 1.0.3 is only 32bit.
btw, Handbrake 0.9.4 64bit just screams on a new Core i7 iMac. 4times the encode speed compared to my old MacBook Pro
AVI and Xvid – way to choose the winners Winblows users!
A link to show you how far up their @$$ the RIAA has its head.
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/02/6190.ars
No AVI support? Hmmm. There’s about 800,000,000 Canon cameras whose movie files are AVIs. HB was good for converting them. Don’t know about this decision…
Jim obviously does not have kids. 3 copies of Finding Nemo on DVD were enough for me… it is ripped now and the kids can watch it without worry of the master being destroyed… again.
The Dude abides.
IT IS LEGAL TO DO A DIGITAL VERSION IF YOU OWN A DVD!!
I buy original DVDs and use Handbrake to watch them in an Apple TV so that my little girls don’t scratch the original DVDs
Ah, not all DVDs come with digital copy, so Handbrake will be needed.
@Bob
Handbrake will still encode FROM avi, it just wont encode TO avi.
re: everyone who likes to troll politics in a *****APPLE AND MACINTOSH****** FORUM:
GO BACK TO FOXNEWS.COM, YOU F*CKTARDS! WE DON’T CARE WHAT YOU THINK!
Now if only tsMuxer would release a snow leopard compatible version, I could finally migrate my mac pro…
I was waiting for the OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch version of Handbrake… does this have it?
I would like its Hawaii-loving icon to be replaced ASAP.
It’s always fun to see how the “HandBrake is bad, it let’s pirates steal” crowd squirms when the conversation shifts to handguns.
@matt / Hm..,
I’m going to assume some off topic posts got removed?
Currently both of your posts look stupidly out of place.