HandBrake
Overview
HandBrake is an open source and multiplatform program that can transcode video files. It is able to handle the most popular video file types and containers and it’s available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X platforms.
Review
When it comes to video transcoders there are a lot of freeware options available right now, from simple straightforward programs to more complex and advanced software. You might already know about MeGui or the “classic” AutoGK, or maybe you were impressed by Rono’s review of XMedia Recode a few days ago. And these are only a few of the plethora of free video transcoders that are available nowadays. With all this competition it could be tough to find the right one for your specific needs and that’s why I decided to publish another review of such a program, so that you’ll have more information about various software and hopefully you’ll be able to make the right decision.
Although there are a few advanced options available in the program, HandBrake is pretty straightforward and easy to use. First you have to select your source and it can be a DVD, a disc image or a DVD VIDEO_TS folder. And there’s more: you can use as a source file basically any multimedia file it can use libavformat to read and libavcodec to decode, and that means dozens of popular or not so popular file formats and codecs.
Once you have selected your source you can pick one of the presets that are available in the right sidebar, from iPod specific files to the “classic” avi or mkv files. I chose the normal preset which I tweaked a bit to get a xvid avi file with an average bitrate around 1500 kbps. Although the picture in the DVD files that I selected as source was 16:9 HandBrake informed me that it was a 4:3 video. But since I had the same experience with other transcoders before I was sure that the output file will come out 16:9. Which it did after all
The process took about 40 minutes to turn an hour long film from DVD to avi using a 2-pass encoding process. As I said the output file came out quite alright, good quality and the correct aspect ratio. As for the output file types that you can select there are a few options: avi, mkv, mp4 or ogm using MPEG-4 (Xvid or others ) or H.264 encoders.
The thing that disappointed me a little bit was that HandBrake can’t extract the subtitles from the DVD like AutoGK used to do. So if you select a subtitle stream it will be hardcoded into the output file, you can’t have it create external subs. In this case I have to use a third party program, SubRip, to get the subtitles as I want them.
Version Tested
0.9.3
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