HandBrake
HandBrake is a free software for transcoding video files. Originally developed for BeOS, the program is now available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It is developed in Objective- C, C and C # and released as free software under the terms of version 3 of the GNU General Public License ( GPL).
- 2.1 Supported sources
- 2.2 Output Format
- 2.3 surfaces
History
Early versions
HandBrake was originally developed by programmer Eric Petit with the pseudonym titer in 2003. This was the lead developer until April 2006 and was then for some time in the HandBrake forum active. Around May / June 2006, the contact titer was lost, and in the following period no new changes to the program code have been performed.
MediaFork
In September 2006, Rodney Hester and Chris Long worked independently from the extract H.264 video compression format by reverse engineering of the firmware of the iPod from Apple. Both met in the HandBrake forum, and it turned out that their work complemented each other. So they started together to develop an even more unstable, but compilable version of HandBrake, which supported the H.264 video format.
Hester and Long developed the software further, in particular in terms of stability, functionality and usability. The absence of titer it was not possible to incorporate these new versions in the official HandBrake repository, since this authorization was required by titer. Hester then created a copy of the repository of the last officially published titer of HandBrake version ( 0.7.1 ), whereupon building Hester and Long the software under the name " MediaFork " further developed.
2007 to today
In 2007 titer Hester and Long offered his support and encouraged them to continue the development of the software. MediaFork was reintegrated in HandBrake, and the next release of MediaFork / HandBrake found again under the original name " HandBrake " instead.
The software " VidCoder " based in part on HandBrake.
Features
HandBrake allows transcoding DVDs and other video sources to H.264 ( x264 ), MPEG- 4 ASP ( FFmpeg ) or Theora/VP3. HandBrake is often used to convert movies from DVDs, so that they can be used on devices such as Apple iPhone, Apple iPod, Apple TV, Xbox 360, PlayStation Portable or PlayStation 3. Through settings profiles the user can specify to which terminals the created files to be compatible.
Supported Sources
Historically, only DVDs were (either directly or from a VIDEO_TS folder) supported as sources, DVD VOB files and transport streams. Since version 0.9.3, the program accepts video files into almost all popular container formats such as avi, mkv or mp4. This is made possible by the integration of the two libavcodec libraries and libavformat, which originate from the FFmpeg project.
Output format
The output is in an MP4 or Matroska container ( MKV ). AVI and Ogg Media ( OGM) are no longer supported since version 0.9.4, because the developers focus primarily on H.264, which is not already compatible with these old container formats. The video is output as H.264 or MPEG -4 ASP, the sound as AAC, Vorbis or MP3, additionally, the original AC3 or DTS audio are embedded unchanged. Also supports HandBrake chapter and language change for MP4 and Matroska, denoising, deinterlacing, detelecine, Anamorphic, cropping and scaling.
HandBrake supplies with their own, specifically modified current versions of the libraries it uses (including x264, libavcodec ) to quickly take advantage of speed and quality improvements eg x264 to. Since version 0.9.4, subtitles can not be "burned " only directly in the video are ( hardsubbed, with color and transparency can be determined ), but also as a separate, fade-out text or image track are mixes (in MKV format ) ( softsubbed ); also HandBrake detects already existing, forced subtitles.
Surfaces
HandBrake exists in six versions for Windows, Mac OS X ( 10.5 or higher ) and Linux each with a graphical interface and a command line version. Since version 0.9.4 enables live preview feature to estimate quickly using a short excerpt of the video transcoded the final quality.