HandBrake

HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.

Features

• Supported Sources
• VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (unencrypted -- CSS is not supported internally and must be handled externally with third-party software and libraries), BDMV folder (unencrypted), and some .VOB and .TS files
• Any multimedia file it can get libavformat to read and libavcodec to decode.
• Outputs
• File format: MP4 and MKV
• Video: MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264 or Theora (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer/rate encoding)
• Audio: AAC, HE-AAC, AC3, MP3, Vorbis, FLAC (16-bit, 24-bit) or AAC, MP3, AC3, DTS and DTS-HD pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)
• Miscellaneous features
• Chapter selection
• Soft subtitle support (DVD/VobSub in DVD/MKV/MP4, Blu-ray/PGS in BD/MKV, SRT files, SRT/UTF-8 in MKV, ASS/SSA in MKV, TX3G/3GPP in MP4 - DVD/VobSub, Blu-ray/PGS and ASS/SSA subtitles can also be burned-in the picture)
• Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
• Grayscale encoding

Note: If you are currently using HandBrake older than version 1.0.0 on macOS Sierra or later, please manually download and install HandBrake 1.1.2.

Note: Now requires OS X 10.10 or later

General

• Switched core decoding library from Libav to FFmpeg
• Fixes numerous sources previously unreadable or otherwise broken
• Facilitates a number of the improvements and features in this release and planned for the future
• Removed deprecated Legacy presets
• See the list of compatible replacements on GitHub
• Updated official presets to use stereo instead of DPL2 mixdown
• Avoids potential spatial positioning issues with the current DPL2 algorithm and wide pans in source material
• Limited in impact since DPL2 decoding has not been in widespread use for years
• Updated official presets descriptions to revise compatibility and mention recently released devices
• Updated official presets to rename Fire TV to Amazon Fire
• Added Amazon Fire 720p30 and Chromecast 1080p60 presets
• Added {creation-date} and {creation-time} to automatic file naming

Video

• Fixed an issue decoding Blu-ray titles where the aspect ratio is unknown (assume 16:9)
• Fixed an issue encoding video with very short frame durations (less than 0.00285s or greater than 350 FPS)
• Improved extradata handling to accommodate all codecs
• Added support for decoding TIFF/LZMA video

Audio

• Fixed potential decoding issue for audio lacking an explicit channel layout (intelligently guess the layout)
• Fixed a potential crash during audio probe
• Improved resampling to allow dithering for all codecs (only where necessary)
• Improved quality of the default AAC encoder on non-Mac platforms (FFmpeg AAC), no longer experimental
• Improved bit rate constraints to allow Opus as low as 6 kbit/s per channel
• Added support for up to 7.1 channel AAC encoding (note that FDK AAC/HE-AAC do not support 6.1)
• Added support for E-AC3 audio in MP4 container
• Added Speex audio decoder

Subtitles

• Fixed a potential crash where an SRT file cannot be opened
• Added support for SRT files using periods instead of commas to delineate fractions

Command line interface

• Fixed inability to override preset subtitles burn setting (native and none are now valid values for --subtitle-burned)

Build system

• Fixed Linux packaging with an out-of-tree build directory
• Fixed Windows graphical interface build script signing tool location
• Removed --enable-local-* and associated contrib libraries; please see the documentation for dependencies help
• Updated to mingw-w64-build 4.1.0 with gcc 7.3.0, continuous output (keep alive), and miscellaneous improvements
• Improved support for building with Xcode 10
• Improved support for building on FreeBSD 11, 12, and 13
• Improved Flatpak packaging for Linux (numerous fixes and improvements, no longer experimental)
• Improved configure.py to always use the Python executable found by configure
• Added script for creating Flatpak manifests
• Added support for selecting a compiler via the CC environment variable
• Miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements

Third-party libraries

• Removed libraries
• Libav 12.3 (decoding and filters)
• yasm 1.3.0
• Updated libraries
• libopus 1.3 (Opus audio encoding)
• x264 157 r2935 (H.264/AVC video encoding)
• x265 2.9 (H.265/HEVC video encoding)
• New libraries
• FFmpeg 4.1 (decoding and filters)
• liblzma (xz) 5.2.4 (LZMA video decoding, e.g. TIFF)
• libspeex 1.2.0 (Speex audio decoding)

Mac

• HandBrake now requires OS X 10.10 Yosemite or later
• Removed preferences option to show the advanced tab (deprecated and slated for removal)
• Fixed minor display issues on macOS 10.14 Mojave
• Fixed queue toolbar icon not updating
• Removed Growl in favor of native system notifications
• Updated Sparkle automatic update library
• Improved handling of invalid presets
• Improved layout to better support localization
• Improved preview border alignment on high density displays
• Improved automatic naming to avoid updating when unrelated settings change
• Improved criteria for showing destination overwrite warnings
• Improved stop encoding confirmation dialog
• Improved notifications to no longer play sounds when alerts are disabled
• Added initial localization support and German translation
• Added initial support for VideoToolbox (hardware-accelerated) encoding
• Added support for Dark Mode in macOS 10.14 Mojave (new Dark Mode toolbar icons require building with Xcode 10 on Mojave)
• Added Touch Bar support to various windows and dialogs
• Added Finder progress bar to files currently encoding
• Added Show Source in Finder to queue contextual menu (renamed Show in Finder to Show Destination in Finder)
• Added validation for custom filter parameters
• Miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements