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Open Source Software

HandBrake 1.0.0 Released After 13 Years Of Development (fossbytes.com) 143

HandBrake, popular open source video transcoder, has finally hit version 1.0.0 affter spending roughly more than 13 years in development. HandBrake 1.0.0 brings tons of new presets and support for more devices and file types. From a report: HandBrake 1.0.0 comes with new web and MKV presets. The official presets from HandBrake 0.10.x can be found under 'Legacy.' New Jason-based preset system, including command line support, has been added. The additional features of HandBrake are title/chapter selection, queuing up multiple encodes, chapter markers, subtitles, different video filters, and video preview. Just in case you have a compatible Skylake or later CPU, Intel QuickSync Video H.265/HEVC encoder support brings performance improvements. HandBrake 1.0.0 also brings along new online documentation beta. It's written in a simple and easy-to-understand language.You can download it here.
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HandBrake 1.0.0 Released After 13 Years Of Development

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  • Beta versioning (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Monday December 26, 2016 @02:14PM (#53556281)

    Is there some obscure point of pride for remaining in "beta" versioning for that long? What's the point of that? It's been quite functional and stable for many years now. Understating your version number is no better than Chrome and Firefox's ridiculous version number race, IMO. Not a huge deal, of course. I just wonder why this is a thing.

    Love Handbrake, but don't use it as often these days as I'm no longer buying and ripping my own DVDs or BluRays to my media server. Streaming is just too convenient.

    • Well no there is no point in staying with a beta that long, unless of course it takes thet long to reach the oals you set for beeing feature complete, which iirc is the point of releasing v 1.0
      • by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26, 2016 @03:14PM (#53556565)

        There's something ironic about the fact that it got out of beta long after the media it originally supported went extinct - it's a little late. For the rest of us we weren't really looking at the fact that it's V0.9 as being remotely significant and we've been using it anyway. Alpha, Beta, Early Access, these terms are all pretty useless now. V1.0 used to mean it's out of beta, QAed and ready for release as a working product. We see game titles that need patches on day 0. These labels don't work anymore.

        A version number is a monotonically increasing number. The only thing significant is that it goes up and only up. There's nothing significant about V1.0.

        We should just use Linux epoch time for version numbers.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )

          There's something ironic about the fact that it got out of beta long after the media it originally supported went extinct

          I'm still buying (and renting) DVDs. There's still no good replacement that works well across different platforms and isn't laden with DRM (DVDs technically have DRM, but it's so thoroughly broken that it may as well not exist).

        • There's something ironic about the fact that it got out of beta long after the media it originally supported went extinct - it's a little late.

          H.265 is extinct? wait... What year is it? Did I miss something? Why is it late that a transcoder supporting a very current codec gets released?

        • by sakusha ( 441986 )

          There's something ironic about the fact that it got out of beta long after the media it originally supported went extinct - it's a little late.

          Be fair, it does a good job of transcoding. I tried using the previous version of Handbrake to transcode some video files that wouldn't play on my iPhone, it was good enough. But I use a Mac and the feature to add a batch of files all at once is missing from that version, so it was a bit inconvenient to set up a big encoding run one file at a time. Maybe they added it to this release. But ultimately since I'm on a Mac and I have Final Cut Pro, it's faster for me to use Compressor.app.

          • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )

            I believe that's been possible via the CLI for a long long time, like a decade. However, I don't run batches, because for whatever reason you can't select a configuration to pick the HD audio as a passthrough with a multiple language selection and subtitles in a preferred order automatically, only dropping those that don't exist. I convert everything to MPEG4 incurring an unnoticeable image degradation saving between 50 and 80% of the original source. I'll admit it is surprising when that 30GB source drops

            • by sakusha ( 441986 )

              It would be difficult to judge by my encoding times, I'm using an antique Mac mini 2011 model with a 2.7Ghz i7. I have an SSD but encoding is CPU intensive so the CPU is the bottleneck. I haven't done any direct comparisons at similar encoding rates, the Compressor settings are so dissimilar that I'm not sure how I'd even compare them to Handbrake. But overall Compressor seems more flexible and faster. Apple pro apps tend to use multithreading very efficiently so they're fast on multicore computers like min

              • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )
                I'm running on multiple machines, including a quad core i7 mini and a 6-core 980x. Handbrake will encode a regular DVD between 150-212 fps depending upon source camera panning (more panning large change per frame shots drops me down to 150 fps or even lower in some circumstances) and BDs are between 25 and 50 fps. I've only done HD camera material via FCP before various upgrades to this machine and ran roughly an average 40 fps encoding rate from multiple sources to final BD master, for mostly framed non-p
                • by sakusha ( 441986 )

                  Well that's another problem right there. My mini doesn't have a DVD drive, if I want to rip a DVD I have to use Remote Drive and link to my old G4 Windtunnel machine, the last machine I owned with an internal DVD drive. So I usually just copy the VOB to my local Mini and transcode it there. I don't know if that is any faster or slower, I have nothing to compare it to, I haven't ripped a DVD in years probably. In transcoding, Handbrake will peg the CPU but I don't recall exact fps, something around 100 I thi

                  • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )
                    External powered 5.25 USB 2.0/3.0 case with an internal SATA connector to hold your favorite BD (DVD) Writer. Needs to be able to write at least DVDs to have OSX grant you full access to the drive's controller. Now you have BD/HD/DVD disk access anytime you want, on any machine you have that has USB 2.0 or greater.
                    • by sakusha ( 441986 )

                      Yeah, I could do that easily enough but it's money I'd rather not spend. DVDs are kind of dead media now, that's where this branch of the discussion originated. I skipped the whole BD hardware era because BDRips are easy enough to find online. I used to do a lot of DVD mastering with DVD Studio Pro but I haven't touched it in years, everyone wants files for online delivery now. For the rare occasions I would ever need a DVD drive, the kludgy Remote Drive is good enough.

                    • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )

                      First, the case $20 on sale, at least around here plus the cost of whatever drive you wish to drop in it. That was purely to address the 'x' doesn't have drive 'y' statement.

                      Second, there's 2 or 3 issues with the online delivery, including quality, reliability, and availability. Streaming for me is a non-starter. The quality is too low overall compared to BD sources, or even DVD sources in some cases, audio especially. Then there's video quality. And finally there's the issue of copyright violations - down

    • Re:Beta versioning (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday December 26, 2016 @05:01PM (#53557031)

      but don't use it as often these days as I'm no longer buying and ripping my own DVDs or BluRays to my media server.

      I use it more now than an ever. The switch to H.265 can save a lot of disk space so I use it to transcode some old under compressed stuff.

      Then there's Skype for business. In MS's infinite wisdom the current version of Skype saves HUGE files even at the lowest quality when recording meetings, and yet the defaults for Sharepoint limit files to 50MB (the company I work for is too big to get something like this changed). None the less you can easily get a 1 hour meeting with powerpoint down to below 50MB in H.264 with the right massaging in Handbrake.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      While HandBrake has released beta and release candidate versions in the past, it was never "in beta". The project switched to semver in version 0.10.0, and 0.10.1-0.10.5 were patch releases for bug fixes. 1.0.0 continues with semver, denoting a major release that is backwards-incompatible in some places.

  • Thanks Jason!

    You're the best!

  • I find it astounding that an i7 2600 laptop running at 2.2 ghz can outperform an AMD 8350 at 4.4 ghz at Handbreak. Meanwhile in other tasks there are no such strange anomalies. My guess is they are using an Intel compiler and getting paid by Intel to make sure performance is crippled on AMD as handbreak is used a lot for benchmarks

    • Its called IPC, AMD sucks when it comes to real performance per clock as much as Pentium 4 did 10 years ago.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by BLKMGK ( 34057 )

      OpenSource program gets paid by Intel to cripple AMD performance? This is your guess based upon poor performance of your CPU? Good grief....

      • OpenSource program gets paid by Intel to cripple AMD performance? This is your guess based upon poor performance of your CPU? Good grief....

        Oh really [intel.com]?

        Yes it is not a vast conspiracy that intel cheats [extremetech.com] with some popular benchmarks.

        • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday December 26, 2016 @05:16PM (#53557107)

          Oh really [intel.com]?

          Maybe you should read that article. And then maybe you should look into what Intel contributed.

          It's kind of hard to "cripple" AMD hardware that AMD doesn't have. Intel contributed a QSV capable codec to Handbrake. AMD are more than welcome to do so too, the source is open and I'm willing to bet Handbrake people wouldn't complain if AMD finally gave people a hardware encoder + code that worked for it.

        • by BLKMGK ( 34057 )

          Wow, that's a lovely article explaining how Intel CONTRIBUTED CODE to an OpenSource project!

          They wanted this application that's heavily used to run fast on their CPUs so they contributed code that utilized H.264 speedups in their processor. Has AMD contributed the same? Does AMD have those speedups in their CPU? Do you think that the Handbrake team would turn down a reasonable OpenSource piece of code from AMD?

          The answer is NO and if the leaders of the team tried it would be forked in no time flat and the c

    • by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      I find it astounding that my 4170 gets beat by a core2 quad ... and I actually paid for it

      AMD has just been sucking ass in the cpu game, has been for a long time now, maybe zen, kind of doubt it though

    • I find it astounding that an i7 2600 laptop running at 2.2 ghz can outperform an AMD 8350 at 4.4 ghz at Handbreak.

      This likely has more to do with the compiler optimizations (and other optimizations) of libav 12.

      I 'think' this is loaded as an external library, you you may wish to attempt to DL the source and compile with AMD centric optimizations and see what happens.

    • Were they running QSV? Intel's internal GPUs support hardware H.264 encoding with Handbrake without any conspiracy theory needed.

    • by Agripa ( 139780 )

      I find it astounding that an i7 2600 laptop running at 2.2 ghz can outperform an AMD 8350 at 4.4 ghz at Handbreak. Meanwhile in other tasks there are no such strange anomalies. My guess is they are using an Intel compiler and getting paid by Intel to make sure performance is crippled on AMD as handbreak is used a lot for benchmarks

      Last time I checked which was a few weeks ago, Intel's compiler and libraries still disable vector code paths based on the CPU manufacturer identification rather than feature flags.

  • Now I can finally get my 2003 Acura out of the driveway.

  • I've had no joy getting it to work on Centos. Plus it has a dependency on the gstreamer-plugins-bad package. Does that ring a bell?

    For the corner case that mencoder & ffmpeg couldn't handle it's not worth it.

    • I've had no joy getting it to work on Centos. Plus it has a dependency on the gstreamer-plugins-bad package. Does that ring a bell?

      For the corner case that mencoder & ffmpeg couldn't handle it's not worth it.

      CentOS is kind of old. Which is not a problem as that is more meant for servers. Have you tried getting it to work on a more desktop friendly up to date distro such as Linux Mint?

      • by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

        Could upgrade to Fedora. You'd probably have an easier time. Don't use the gnome shit though. Install kde/plasma. A real desktop. Then set the cursor so focus follows mouse. Anything else is so 1980s, like Windows.

    • Plus it has a dependency on the gstreamer-plugins-bad package. Does that ring a bell?

      Yeah it rings a bell. A set of plugins in need of a code review that provide functionality to other packages. Why don't you fix the problem by helping the gstreamer guys rather than criticising other software for not re-inventing the wheel.

  • 0.10.5 on MacOS does not believe any new updates are available.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Updates will be enabled after the initial rush on downloads is over, so as to not overload our servers.

  • After several days of trying different settings while attempting to digitize my old VHS tapes and DVDs, I gave up on HandBrake. The decomb/deinterlace filter they use to convert interlaced video to progressive is atrocious. Diagonal lines end up looking like jaggies in 1990s video games before anti-aliasing became a thing. It seems to be fine for progressive -> progressive conversions, but it was a huge waste of time for interlaced -> progressive conversions.
    • One thing I've found to be very helpful on old VHS material brought in, is to use the temporal denoise filter in Handbrake. Something like HQDN3D 2:1:9:9 works pretty well. You might have to play with it more depending on how much noise you have vs. how much detail you want to keep.
  • THANK YOU - - - Eric Petit (aka "titer" from his SVN repository username), Laurent Aimar (fenrir), Van Jacobson (van), John Allen (johnallen), Joe Crain (dynaflash), Damiano Galassi (ritsuka), Edward Groenendaal (eddyg), David Foster (davidfstr), Rodney Hester (rhester), Andrew Kimpton (awk), Chris Lee (clee), Chris Long (chrislong), Brian Mario (brianmario)Maurj (maurj), Mirkwood (mirkwood), Nyx (Nyx), Philippe Rigaux (prigaux), Jonathon Rubin (jbrjake), Scott (s55), John Stebbins (j45), Chris Thoman (huevos_rancheros), Mark Krenek (travistex), Kona "Mike" Blend (KonaBlend), David Rickard (RandomEngy), Tim Walker (Rodeo), Bradley Sepos (BradleyS), Maxym Dm (maxim_d33), and all the others that have assisted in this project ! ! ! ! !

    https://github.com/HandBrake/H... [github.com]

    HANDBRAKE has been 'my friend' for many years, even as a beta, and has allowed me to view many videos without having to know anything (or very little) about the inner workings of transcoders / video-packages / 'container' details, etc.

    Cheers to you and those like you that provide help for the semi-educated masses that need help converting videos from one format to another !

    I cannot adequately express the level of admiration and respect I have for those of you that are providing services for the people, free of charge, and solely for your own gratification.

    Best and Sincere Regards - - - and Happy Holidays
    rickyslashdot

  • Given that there is this limitation imposed on the software authors:

    It can process the most common media files and DVD/Blu-ray sources that don’t have any type of copy protection.

    What is handbrake good for?

    • by jedidiah ( 1196 )

      Something you've already decrypted with another tool.

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        It is also possible to add a little something something into handbrake and it will do it for you. I have to admit I am getting a bit slack in my old age and when it comes to porting my DVD contents to hard disk drive, rather that swapping disks I just download it from the internet, I already have license to the content and that is easier than swapping hundreds and hundreds of DVDs (don't even know how many but I can still remember not to buy the same content over again, well, mostly).

    • by chill ( 34294 )

      It can encode files to different sizes, aspect ratios and formats. It is frequently used as a companion to something like MakeMKV [makemkv.com], which will do the actual ripping from media to file.

      • I'm still using ye olde dvdbackup to rip DVDs from the commandline under Linux. When I want to watch a series but don't want to deal with flipping discs I just hook up my three external drives to my Linux box (which has one internal drive as well) and run four screens of it.

        What's the blu-ray equivalent? I'm thinking about buying a blu-ray drive. Or finally replacing my antique BDP-S300 with something less crap, and stealing its drive. It just has a SATA drive in it, and apparently it works OK under Windows

        • by chill ( 34294 )

          MakeMKV rips BluRay fine. I've ripped scores of them, then encoded to h.264 m4v files using Handbrake -- from Avatar to Downton Abbey. Just about any SATA BR player should work fine under Linux.

          Lots of software like Kodi or OpenELEC will index and play series files just fine, looking up against thetvdb.com as long as you name them properly. I use "Name Season x Episode", like "Downton Abbey 1x02.m4v".

          The next challenge is UltraHD -- 4K BluRay discs, which might take some time to get cracked.

    • by martinX ( 672498 )

      What a PITA that was. I have it sorted now. I have Handbrake 1.0.1, VLC 2.2.4 and I replaced libdvdcss_2.x.x with libdvdcss_1.4.0

      I was able to rip an encrypted Get Smart episode to h.264 and also to h.265 using Handbrake, and VLC could play them both back. Handbrake can also decode ProRes movs. Success!

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Anonymous Coward

      I haven't checked recently, but historically we could not add it because it required linking against Non-GPL license compatible code, which means we would not have been able to ship binaries with it included.

      I know ffmpeg / libav now has supported. If it can be enabled without --non-free (to maintain GPL compatibility) we are open to patches to integrate this into HandBrake.

      If someone wants to give it a shot, they are welcome to join #handbrake to speak to us about it. There isn't a huge interest in it amon

    • I've been biding my time and hoping they'd change their minds about it, but that doesn't seem to be happening :(

      I'm not sure adding non-GPL code to GPL code is something someone can just change their minds about.

  • HandBrake was, in its early life, one of the more exciting and useful apps on BeOS. I've always been happy that an app which began life on that alternative operating system has become so widely-used. It made a great pairing with the early VLC ports to BeOS.

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