HandBrake has been a handy tool for media creators for over a decade. The free, open-source application makes it easy to convert and encode media of almost any format. HandBrake recently crossed an important milestone in its development, having finally reached an official version 1.0.0 release:
After more than 13 years of development, the HandBrake Team is delighted to present HandBrake 1.0.0. Thank you to all of our many contributors over the years for making HandBrake what it is today.
Here are some features included in HandBrake 1.0.0:
– New online documentation at https://handbrake.fr/docs
– Completely overhauled the official presets
– New general use presets for broad compatibility
– New device presets, now more up-to-date for common devices
– New web presets
– New Matroska (MKV) presets, including VP9 video with Opus audio
– Official presets from HandBrake 0.10.x are still available under “Legacy”
– New JSON-based preset system including command line support
– New JSON-based API for interacting with libhb
– Improvements to audio/video sync engine to better handle difficult sources
– Many miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements
– VP9 video encoding via libvpx
– Intel QuickSync Video H.265/HEVC encoder
– Requires Intel Skylake or newer CPU
– Ultra HD / 4K color pass through (support for BT.2020)
– Additional standard frame rate selections in the graphical interfaces
– New Auto anamorphic mode maximizes storage resolution, replaces Strict anamorphic mode
– New Pad filter (command line only for now)
– New Decomb/Deinterlace filter settings and improved defaults
– Rotate filter now available in all graphical interfaces
– New NLMeans filter tunes Tape and Sprite for analog tape recordings and vintage video games, respectively
– Assembly optimizations NLMeans filter improve performance up to 10%
– Assembly optimizations in x264 encoder improve performance for faster presets by 5-10%
– x265 encoder quality improvements, especially when using tune grain
– High bit depth encoding support via external shared libraries (video pipeline is still 8-bit 4:2:0)
– x264 10-bit
– x265 10-bit and 12-bit
To learn more about HandBrake 1.0.0, click the link at the top of this article. HandBrake is available as a free download for macOS, Windows, and Linux, as a well as a command-line version of the application.
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