HandBrake ENCODER!

Dr. Righteous

2[H]4U
Joined
Aug 1, 2007
Messages
3,163
One of the coolest pieces of software is HandBrake.

The fact you can rip a DVD to H.264 with equal quality of the original but take a 3rd of the disk space is rank high on the CooL list.

My sig lists my systems specs, (yes they are underwhelming).
When ripping a DVD at the NORMAL setting I'm getting an average of about 74 fps but as high as 99 fps and as low as 30 fps.

I'm waiting on HandBrake to catch up with the later versions of Ubuntu (not compatible with newer version of Gnome) because I really want to see how it does under Linux.

There are a couple other H.264 encoders for LInux out there I have tried, but they are not reliable as HandBrake.

I'm pondering upgrading to a x940 Phenom II and I'm wondering what kind of boost in encoding speed I will see.
What do you think? What kind of FPS are you seeing on your system??
 
Nice to see someone catching up with HandBrake while some of us have been using it for years now. :)

HandBrake's nightly builds work just fine with Ubuntu 10.04 - not the standard regular public release, that is. You have to go to the forums, find the *nix subforum, then open the Nightly Builds thread to get the link. The Nightly Build page will have a link specifically for Ubuntu builds which are handled by one guy (so don't get pissed if he takes a few days to get caught up on the builds).

You'll be directed to LaunchPad where you need to add the PPA repository to Ubuntu and then you can install the HandBrake nightly builds from that point on.

Since the *nix versions offer 32 and 64 bit support, you can get a nice little boost in performance if you're using Ubuntu 64 bit and the corresponding HandBrake version.

There are too many variables involved to be able to say "oh I'll get <xxx> fps if I use this processor, this RAM, etc" because the content itself can still cause wide fluctuations in the actual encoding framerates.

If it's faster than real-time encoding, you're all set and the faster the better.

One thing you can do to get a "baseline" of sorts is a simple test of HandBrake on your machine and then use that for comparison. The best "standard" encoding benchmark I use myself is the x264 HD Benchmark 3.0, found here. Download that archive (it's a Zip with most everything necessary in it), then make sure to install AVIsynth (links on that page), run the benchmark to completion, then post the basic results for comparsion.

There's a thread at that TechArp forum specifically for people to post/compare results, as well.

Personally, I just take the MPEG video clip included in that benchmark and use that with HandBrake for testing as the actual x264 Benchmark can take upwards of 20+ minutes to run all the passes. I've found just using that 30 second 720p clip is more than adequate for HandBrake benchmarking.
 
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I love Handbrake. In the process of ripping\encoding 300 DVD/Blu-Ray movies to my media computer. The number of settings can be a little daunting, but it means that you can fine tune the encode to fit your personal needs. It also scales very well, so moving to the 940 will make a noticeable difference, especially if you overclock to 3.6+.
 
Nice to see someone catching up with HandBrake while some of us have been using it for years now. :)

HandBrake's nightly builds work just fine with Ubuntu 10.04 - not the standard regular public release, that is. You have to go to the forums, find the *nix subforum, then open the Nightly Builds thread to get the link. The Nightly Build page will have a link specifically for Ubuntu builds which are handled by one guy (so don't get pissed if he takes a few days to get caught up on the builds).

You'll be directed to LaunchPad where you need to add the PPA repository to Ubuntu and then you can install the HandBrake nightly builds from that point on.

Since the *nix versions offer 32 and 64 bit support, you can get a nice little boost in performance if you're using Ubuntu 64 bit and the corresponding HandBrake version.

I have been using HandBrake for a couple months now. I was about to pay for Divx when I ran across handbrake. Used it once and then uninstalled Divx. :D
My quad core system is a dual boot with winXP and Ubuntu 64 10.4 so I will definitely check out the nightly builds!
I want to add a couple more gigs of RAM and upgrade the CPU so I have put it to work archiving 200+ DVDs.

I moved off Windoze on my work system when 10.4 came out. You could not pay me to go back to windoze to work on a daily basis! The speed increase on this OLD machine (8 year old P4) is unreal.

If I could find a video editor that matched the functionality of Sony Vegas for Linux; that would relegate Windows to game machine only! :D

I will download that x264 bench and see what my quad coughs up. :)
 
My only complaint with the latest version of Handbrake is that the presets are missing. That makes ripping for Xbox 360 playback much more difficult.
 
They've effectively given up on the "presets" for any given devices except Apple products (since HandBrake originally started on the OSX platform). The Apple Universal preset works remarkably well on most any device I've done testing with. Too many variables to muck around with for each given device eventually made the developers just quit putting the presets in - besides, in the forums most of the active developers admitted they don't even own other devices like PS3s, Xboxes (either version), etc.

You can still create the presets manually and save them, of course, just takes some testing to get the specifics worked out for any given device.

For Xbox 360 specific encodings, Encode360 or EncodeHD can get that job done but, with a loss of quality and an increase in encoding time (those apps use ffmpeg which is - in my opinion - vastly inferior to the x264 encoder in HandBrake, but it does get the job done).
 
Hello

My first post here on Hardforum..

Was googling to see what average fps benchmark times are on Handbrake as have been using it for a few years now and recently built my second PC and wanted a comparison for my new build. Therefore came across your thread.

Hope I'm not hijacking and I know this is an older thread but thought this may be interesting and if I'm correct there was an interest in AMD processing.

My build is basically AMD FX 8350 with Crosshair V Formula-Z. I've used the ROG 'Auto Tune' to OC to around 14% to 4600MHZ and run a Corsair H80i water cooler and a Radeon HD 7900 and 16GB Corsair @ 1600Mhz. As it was a relatively 'cheap' build at under 1K (uk sterling) I ran a comparison with our best HP Z800 Avid system at work using Handbrake on a simple video encode at the standard 'Normal' handbrake preset. IE H.264(x264) same as source framerate at constant RF:20 quality. On the Z800 I get approximately 212 fps on a dvd encode. On my homebuild I'm currently getting 270 + fps with stable operating temperature around 40 C.

I do a lot of video encoding so am pleased with the results. I'm yet to test with some more serious video transcoding say camera rushes from Canon 5D or Canon C300 with Avid MC 6.5 so am looking forward to getting that hooked up, if it is possible with Windows 8 on my system!

To be fair the Z800 is now probably slightly outdated and NOT at all overclocked however is an all guns blazing uber XEON processor and a £4k + piece of kit

BTW been an Ubuntu user for about 4 or 5 years now and still run 10.04 LTS on my now old XEON HP G5 server. Handbrake still works great on it in 64bit mode however won't get much better than 20fps on it. It is a cracking media server though was much faster when used CLI only with no GUI and unfortunately still find it a bit of a grind to get it to do what I want. IMO it depends how much time you have for tweaking.

Peace

Jake
 
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If you want to compare benchmarks, we need to encode the same movie. Look for an HD video and hit me with the link, I'll encode it and give you the results. See my sig for system details.
 
Holy thread necromancy, Batman... nearly 3 years since this one had any activity, wow, I would guess a Mod would raise issues with that (but then again every forum has different rules I suppose).

As far as benchmarks of video encoding are concerned, does it really matter overall? I mean I see those numbers listed above by jakestrat but, that's apparently not High Profile encoding 'cause that level of crunching will make any processor beg for mercy, even 6 and even 10 core processors (I know a guy with a dual 10-core Xeon box he uses for professional 3D rendering and even that one chokes a bit when trying to do High Profile encoding, oddly enough).

If you're using HandBrake with the "defaults" it'll be Normal profile which is relatively simple to do and would offer up such high framerates for simple SD transcoding, but switch it over to High Profile and then things will slow down to a crawl, more or less.

Also, if you're using HandBrake you've probably got the public build (0.9.8) which is getting pretty old now, they have nightly builds available (you can find the links in the forums at handbrake.fr) which are built with more current versions of the x264 encoder and are more efficient and also take advantage of newer CPU capabilities in Ivy Bridge and with the AMD stuff too.

Worth checking into I'd say. And finally, if you're serious about doing video encoding, then it's gotta be High Profile more so than anything else, at least Level 3.1 and preferably 4.1 especially for HD content.
 
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