Well it only took 13 years but HandBrake 1.0.0 is officially here

D

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Took long enough but it was worth it with a whole slew of new features including VP9 video and Opus audio support as well as h.265/x265 hardware encoding support for Intel QuickSync (requires a Skylake or newer CPU) amongst many others. You can read more about the release here:

https://handbrake.fr/news.php?article=37

and of course get the release from the main page at:

https://handbrake.fr

Been using HandBrake the better part of the past decade myself and I still find it an invaluable tool for video transcoding purposes, now with the new features and additional audio and video formats it'll probably get even more use from me.
 
Considering it's usefulness prior to version 1.0.0, it makes me wonder how arbitrary the version numbers are.
 
^^^ Probably about as arbitrary as the version numbers of browsers are these days. :ROFLMAO:
 
I gave the new version a whirl on a recently DVR (I usually use Freemake).

I notice that even if I use the same resolution as the source, the converted video comes out blurry. I am using h.265 in MP4 container. I don't quite understand how the bitrate setting on this works. I only see a quality slider and avg. bitrate manual setting. It also takes over 4 hours to convert a 3 hours video, is that normal? Intel 6600k cpu.

Thanks.
 
h.265 aka HEVC is incredibly tough to encode with high profile settings or most anything even close to it. That CPU is the i5-6600K I presume since I can't find an i7-6600K listed anywhere and that would put it in the Skylake architecture. You could try using the QuickSync setting (under the Video tab, on the Video Codec drop down, change it to H.265 (Intel QSV) and then redo an encode (maybe 1 chapter of a DVD or Blu-ray not the whole thing) and you should see a significant decrease in encoding time, like from hours to minutes literally. The downside is with the QuickSync settings you don't have the same level of fine configuration options nor will it produce the quality that a proper H.265 full encode can provide but, that's the purpose of QuickSync anyway: to transcode a video into another format with speed as the primary focus for encoding and not quality.

I use H.264 QuickSync on my older Sandy Bridge i7 and it works fine. No, it won't ever produce output that can match a full on high profile encode done the right way but in situations where you just need to transcode something fast and have it be watchable (not perfect quality) it's acceptable. Skylake has H.265 QuickSync hardware encoding support so again it should be way way faster but I can't say how much faster since I've never used that kind of hardware as of yet. With the H.264 QSV stuff it typically cranks out 300-400 fps (seriously) for most 720p content with the basic settings, I'm sure doing the H.265 QSV will be fast but probably not that fast.

As for it being blurry I can't speak for why that might be happening. If you're already using the QSV option then that could be part of it because as just explained QuickSync is all about maxing out the encoding speed with quality as a secondary concern overall unless you adjust the defaults to give it a little boost in overall quality.

Even on the newest hardware like Kaby Lake i7's, if you're using pure software encoding for H.265 it's going to take a very very long time and if utmost quality is a concern then it's really going to take a long time, it's just how that codec works but it can produce some pretty amazing quality at very small filesizes, typically half what H.264 has been capable of for the same resolution and visual quality.
 
I actually liked Handbrake more back in the day when they were still small. Back when everyone was using MeGUI as the frontend for x264, handbrake offered the simplest drag and drop interface with an x264 encoder that actually worked out of the box. I tried every other encoder under the sun, but most of them would give a/v sync issues or result in poor quality. Handbrake just worked with no fuss.

Once it started becoming popular all of the "expert" people started tinkering with it and wanted all kinds of extras bolted onto it. Somewhere along the lines they basically broke the out of the box configuration, and to this day the defaults are just wrong. Thankfully I stumbled upon what the problem was while cruising forums. The default frame rate should just use or constant frame rate and not variable frame rate. VFR basically guarantees that you'll end up with a/v desync and you'll have to try to screw with your video to fix it. I have yet to see a video go through with VFR and not have it desync the audio. I'm sure someone can or knows how to make VFR work properly, but what made handbrake popular in the first place was it's simplicity.

I'll still definitely check out this newest version, and hopefully with the new presets and knowing that I need to change the settings to CFR it will work well with little messing around.

EDIT: It looks like they changed the name of the variable frame rate to "peak" frame rate. I'm half tempted to try it and see if it actually works now or if I should just stick with a constant frame rate.
 
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Never had any issues using variable frame rate personally but I suppose on some hardware configs it'll cause issues. Personally I do use constant frame rate matched to the source, pretty much always, but there have been instances of testing where I did variable encodes and never noticed any A/V sync issues myself.
 
And here we go with the point numbers already: HandBrake 1.0.1 has been released and fixes a few bugs apparently.

You can get the release at the main site as always: HandBrake

(and no I won't be updating this with every point release, just this one since it came out rather quickly after the full 1.0.0 did just a few days ago)
 
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