HandBrake

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HandBrake
HandBrake Icon.png
HandBrake 0.9.5.png
Developer(s) HandBrake community
Stable release 0.9.8 / 18 July 2012; 9 months ago (2012-07-18)[1]
Written in Objective-C, C, C#
Platform FreeBSD,[2] GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Windows
Available in English
Type Transcoder
License GNU GPLv2+ and proprietary license for the FAAC encoder[3]
Website HandBrake.fr

HandBrake is a general-purpose, free, open-source, cross-platform, multithreaded video transcoder software application.[4] HandBrake was originally developed by Eric "titer" Petit in 2003 as a general-purpose video transcoder to make ripping a film from a DVD to a data storage device easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions.[5]

HandBrake makes use of many LGPL libraries from the Linux platform.[6]

Contents

History [edit]

Early versions [edit]

HandBrake was originally developed by Eric "titer" Petit in 2003 as software for the BeOS, before porting it to other systems.[7] He continued to be the primary developer until April 2006, when the last official subversion was submitted. "titer" continued to be active on the HandBrake forum for a brief period after, until contact was lost. Since May–June 2006, no one in the HandBrake community was successful in contacting "titer" and no further code changes were officially made.[5]

MediaFork [edit]

In September 2006, Rodney Hester and Chris Long were independently working to extract the H.264 video compression format from Apple’s iPod firmware (1.2) through reverse engineering before meeting on the HandBrake forum. Fortunately, their work complemented each other’s and they began working together to develop an unstable, but compilable, release of HandBrake supporting the H.264 format. Hester and Long made considerable progress in terms of stability, functionality, and look and feel. Unfortunately, it was not possible to submit their patch to the HandBrake subversion repository without authorisation from "titer".[5]

Unable to submit their revisions as a successor to HandBrake, Hester created a subversion repository mirroring HandBrake’s final subversion (0.7.1) on the HandBrake website and began development on top of that. Hester and Long named the new project MediaFork.[5]

From 2007 [edit]

On 13 February 2007, Hester and Long were contacted by "titer" who informed them of his support and encouraged them to continue development. Plans were then made to reintegrate MediaFork as a direct successor to HandBrake. The MediaFork website and forums were relocated to HandBrake’s and the next release was officially named HandBrake.[5]

There is another transcoder, called VidCoder, that uses HandBrake as its encoding engine [8]

Features [edit]

Encoding [edit]

Users are able to customise the output by altering the bit rate, maximum file size or bit rate and sample rate via “constant quality”.[9]

Batch [edit]

HandBrake supports batch encoding through the Linux, Mac OS X and Windows graphical user interface (GUI) and command line interface (CLI).[10] Third party scripts and UIs exist specifically for this purpose, such as HandBrake Batch Encoder,[11] VideoScripts.[12] and Batch HandBrake.[13] All make use of the CLI to enable queueing of several files in a single directory.

Video filtering [edit]

HandBrake also supports deinterlacing, decombing, scaling, detelecine, and (auto-)cropping.

Sources [edit]

Handbrake, according to its website, "converts video from nearly any format to a handful of modern ones — that's it"; it does not crack copy protection. One form of input is DVD that can be sourced from a data storage device as a VIDEO_TS folder or ISO image or directly from an optical disc drive.

DVD [edit]

HandBrake’s developers removed libdvdcss (the open-source library responsible for accessing and unscrambling DVDs encrypted with the Content Scramble System (CSS)) from the application in version 0.9.2. Removal of digital rights management (DRM) in HandBrake is possible by installing VLC, a media player application that includes the libdvdcss library.[14]

Blu-ray Disc [edit]

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 the digital rights management is first removed using a third party application, such as MakeMKV. MakeMKV is a popular application for decrypting Blu-ray Discs and is often used in conjunction with HandBrake.[citation needed]

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.[15]

Support [edit]

Input [edit]

Output [edit]

Container formats
Video formats
Audio formats

See also [edit]

References [edit]

  1. ^ "Download". HandBrake. Retrieved 19 July 2012. 
  2. ^ Marion, Damjan. "FreeBSD port overview". Retrieved 11 November 2012. 
  3. ^ "Drop FAAC in favor of FF-AAC". HandBrake. Retrieved 29 February 2012. 
  4. ^ "Details". HandBrake. Retrieved 6 August 2011. 
  5. ^ a b c d e Hester, Rodney; Long, Chris (17 March 2007). "History of HandBrake". HandBrake. Retrieved 6 August 2011. 
  6. ^ "Credits in Trunk". HandBrake. 20 June 2011. Retrieved 6 August 2011. 
  7. ^ "HandBrake version 0.7.0-beta3". Eric Petit. Retrieved 1 January 2013. 
  8. ^ "VidCoder Home". Retrieved 4 March 2012. 
  9. ^ Gralla, Preston (23 March 2011). "Editorial Review of HandBrake". PC World. Retrieved 6 August 2011. 
  10. ^ "Queue". Handbrake. Retrieved 6 August 2011. 
  11. ^ "HandBrake Batch Encoder". Retrieved 21 February 2010. 
  12. ^ "Videoscripts batch encoding scripts". Retrieved 20 October 2010. 
  13. ^ "Batch HandBrake". Retrieved 18 March 2013. 
  14. ^ Breen, Christopher (1 October 2008). "Updated HandBrake Encodes More Than DVDs". PC World. Retrieved 6 August 2011. 
  15. ^ Seff, Jonathan (20 January 2010). "Blu-ray ripping on the Mac". MacWorld. Retrieved 6 August 2011. 

External links [edit]