Other customization options include the possibility to add your own subtitle files, and to edit or import chapters. In addition, you can apply various filters: deinterlace, decomb, denoise, detelecine, deblock, or grayscale, and you can also choose to optimize the video for web usage, or for iPod 5G devices. HandBrake automatically adapts the picture size to match the target device, but you can also manually crop or adjust the image height or width. The conversion queue includes batch processing capabilities and can resume the encoding at a later time Noteworthy is that HandBrake offers support for the H.265 video encoder, which is a very powerful compression standard that seems to represent the next step in handling high-quality video content. Note that HandBrake can also passthru certain audio formats from the source: AC3, DTS, DTS-HD, MP3, and AAC. HandBrake supports only two types of file containers for the output (MP4/M4V and MKV), but can handle various video (H.264, H.265, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VP8, Theora) and audio (AAC, HE-AAC, AC3, MP3, Vorbis, Flac) formats.
To streamline the workflow, HandBrake comes with built-in conversion profiles that help you generate video files compatible with different types of devices: iPod, iPhone and iPod touch, iPad, Apple TV, Android (phone or tablet), or Windows 8 phones.įurthermore, HandBrake enables you to effortlessly create your own presets and organize them into different folders, and as a result, you can make personalized profiles for each of your devices once, and use them any time you need to convert a new video. Predefined encoding profiles help you produce videos compatible with specific devicesĮven if HandBrake does not feature a stylish, “modern” looking interface design, finding your way around is fairly intuitive. You can also check out some additional articles that include details about ripping DVD or Blu-ray discs.
Note that, even if HandBrake can convert video data from DVDs and Blu-ray disks, the app does not have ripping capabilities: it cannot handle encrypted discs, and copying the data to your Mac first is advisable to reduce the processing time. This means that HandBrake can deal with a large list of video formats (any format supported by the libavformat and libavcodec libraries), and has access to efficient tools developed by the open source community. Thanks to its open source status, HandBrake is able to use a wide collection of video libraries that are released under BSD or (L)GPL.
HandBrake is an open source project that deals with video encoding, and can help you convert most video files to the MP4 and MKV formats. Most devices that can play media content have a list of supported formats, making the use of third-party video and audio conversion tools fairly popular.