Next, you have three options: Forced Only, Burned In and Default. Pick a track and click the +Subtitle button to add them. For example, you might wish to add subtitles, and this isn't covered by any of the presets. Of course, you probably want to adjust the options before starting. These come in handy in different situations - you don't want to shutdown when doing a quick encode of a video you recorded with your smartphone, but you might when batch processing entire seasons of shows overnight. Handbrake will notify you when it's done, but this behaviour can be changed in Preferences under the General tab - you can choose between quitting the program, shutting down the computer, putting it to sleep or doing nothing at all. At this point, you may select one of the presets on the left and click Start - and that's it, the encoding will start and you can forget about it until it finishes.
Notice how the Summary tab went from being greyed out to displaying information about the video. In this example, I'll be using my Fitzcarraldo DVD: Click Source and select the VIDEO_TS folder. Let's suppose you have a DVD you wish to encode. You may, of course, edit these or add your own according to your needs.
Finally, presets are present as well, enabling you to target a platform (device) of choice with a single click. In addition to this, Handbrake has several features that make it stand out from the competition, such as batch encoding (Add to Queue), chapter selection and markers, subtitle handling, choosing between Constant Quality or Average Bitrate encoding, video filters and live video preview.Īn additional nicety about Handbrake is that nearly all options are explained in tooltips that appear if you hover with the cursor over a particular option, though a few of the explanations might seem overwhelming to casual users because of their sheer length. You may also choose audio pass-thru, meaning the original audio will be preserved, which is very useful, especially if it's already of low quality.
You can choose between the MP4 and MKV container formats, H.264, MPEG-4, MPEG-2 and Theora video encoders and AAC, MP3, AC3, Flac and Vorbis (OGG) audio encoders.
The audio and video encoders available depend on how Handbrake was compiled and what libraries (codecs) you have installed on your system, but most systems will have access to the full spectrum of available encoders. Decryption is OS-specific and potentially legally messy, and since it's a tangential topic anyway, we won't cover it here.Īs for output, you have several choices for audio, video and container formats. It should be noted that Handbrake does not handle copy protection - that's something you need to take care of in advance.
You wouldn't be using it if you didn't have something you want to convert, right? Worry not, you can feed Handbrake pretty much any sort of source - multimedia files, DVDs (including ISO images) or Blu-Ray discs. Having said that, Mac users can take a look at the GUI in this brief article. We will be using the Linux version of the program, but the differences across platforms are mostly cosmetic. This article will give an overview of its features and then guide you through a typical use case.
It's a free (GPL-licensed), open source tool that enables you to easily convert from nearly any format to the most often used codecs of today, thus making them useful on devices beyond your desktop computer. HandBrake is a cross-platform (Linux, OS X, Windows), multi-threaded video transcoding application.