HandBrake is a free and open-source transcoder for digital video files, originally developed in 2003 by Eric Petit (a.k.a. "titer" from his SVN repository username) to make ripping a film from a DVD to a data storage device easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions.

HandBrake is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows.It uses third-party libraries such as FFmpeg, libvpx, and x265.

Features

• Hardware acceleration

Some GPUs or APUs contain SIP blocks dedicated to do calculations for video encoding (e.g., Quick Sync Video, NVENC or Video Coding Engine). Such solutions are limited to the widely used codecs. When used, they are very fast but depending on the ASIC hardware generation, may or may not match the quality of good software encoders.HandBrake supports Intel Quick Sync since version 0.10.0 (November 2014). NVENC and VCE support was added in version 1.2.0 in December 2018.

• Transcoding

Users are able to customize the output by altering the bit rate, maximum file size or bit rate and sample rate via “constant quality”.HandBrake also supports adaptive deinterlacing, scaling, detelecine, and cropping (both automatic and manual).

• Batch

HandBrake supports batch encoding through graphical user interface (GUI) and command-line interface (CLI).Third-party scripts and UIs exist specifically for this purpose, such as HandBrake Batch Encoder, VideoScripts, and Batch HandBrake. All make use of the CLI to enable queueing of several files in a single directory.

• Sources

Handbrake transcodes video and audio from nearly any format to a handful of modern ones, but it does not defeat or circumvent copy protection. One form of input is DVD-Video stored on a DVD, in an ISO image of a DVD, or on any data storage device as a VIDEO_TS folder. HandBrake’s developers removed libdvdcss (the open-source library responsible for unscrambling DVDs encrypted with the Content Scramble System (CSS)) from the application in version 0.9.2. Removal of digital rights management (DRM) from DVDs using HandBrake was possible by installing VLC, a media player application that includes the libdvdcss library. Currently, Handbrake can remove DRM only after the user installs the latest version of libdvdcss.

As with DVDs, HandBrake does not directly support the decryption of Blu-ray Discs. However, HandBrake can be used to transcode a Blu-ray Disc if DRM is first removed using a third-party application, such as MakeMKV. Unlike HandBrake, MakeMKV does not transcode; it removes the digital rights management from a Blu-ray Disc and creates an exact copy, at its original frame size and data rate, in a Matroska (MKV) multimedia container which can then be used as a source in HandBrake.

Specifications

Industry :

General