Developer(s) | HandBrake community |
---|---|
Stable release | 0.9.5 / 3 January 2011[1] |
Preview release | svn4342 / 6 November 2011 |
Written in | Objective-C, C, C# |
Platform | Mac OS X, Linux, Windows |
Available in | English |
Type | Transcoder |
License | GNU General Public License |
Website | HandBrake.fr |
HandBrake is a general-purpose, open-source, cross-platform, multithreaded video transcoder software application.[2] HandBrake was originally developed by titer in 2003 as a general-purpose video transcoder to make ripping a film from a DVD to a data storage device easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular amongst film enthusiasts.[3]
HandBrake borrows many LGPL libraries from the Linux platform.[4]
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HandBrake was originally developed by titer in 2003. He continued to be the primary developer until April 2006, when the last official subversion was submitted. titer continued to be active on the HandBrake forum for a brief period after, until contact was lost. Since May-June 2006, no one in the HandBrake community was successful in contacting titer and no further code changes were officially made.[3]
In September 2006, Rodney Hester and Chris Long were independently working to extract the H.264 video compression format from Apple’s iPod firmware (1.2) through reverse engineering before meeting on the HandBrake forum. Fortunately, their work complemented each other’s and they began working together to develop an unstable, but compilable, release of HandBrake supporting the H.264 format. Hester and Long made considerable progress in terms of stability, functionality, and look and feel. Unfortunately, it was not possible to submit their subversion to the HandBrake subversion repository without authorisation from titer.[3]
Unable to submit their revisions as a successor to HandBrake, Hester created a subversion repository mirroring HandBrake’s final subversion (0.7.1) on the HandBrake website and began development on top of that. Hester and Long named the new project MediaFork.[3]
On 13 February 2007, Hester and Long were contacted by titer who informed them of his support and encouraged them to continue development. Plans were then made to reintegrate MediaFork as a direct successor to HandBrake. The MediaFork website and forums were relocated to HandBrake’s and the next release was officially named HandBrake.[3]
Users are able to customise the output by altering the bit rate, maximum file size or bit rate and sample rate via “constant quality”.[5]
HandBrake supports batch encoding through the Mac OS X, Linux and Windows graphical user interface (GUI) and command line interface (CLI).[6] Third party scripts and UI’s exist specifically for this purpose, such as HandBrake Batch Encoder[7] and VideoScripts.[8] Both make use of the CLI to enable queueing of several files in a single directory.
HandBrake also supports deinterlacing, decombing, scaling, detelecine, and cropping.
Handbrake, according to its website, "converts video from nearly any format to a handful of modern ones — that's it"; it does not crack copy protection. One form of input is DVD that can be sourced from a data storage device as a VIDEO_TS folder or ISO image or directly from an optical disc drive.
HandBrake’s developers removed libdvdcss (the open-source library responsible for accessing and unscrambling DVDs encrypted with the Content Scramble System (CSS)) from the application in version 0.9.2. Removal of digital rights management (DRM) in HandBrake is possible by installing VLC (0.9.x), a media player application that includes the libdvdcss library.[9]
As with DVDs, HandBrake does not directly support the decryption of Blu-ray Discs. However, HandBrake can be used to transcode a Blu-ray Disc if the digital rights management is first removed using a third party application, such as MakeMKV. MakeMKV is a popular application for decrypting Blu-ray Discs and is often used in conjunction with HandBrake.
Unlike HandBrake, MakeMKV does not transcode; it removes the digital rights management from a Blu-ray Disc and creates an exact copy, at its original frame size and data rate, in a Matroska (MKV) multimedia container which can then be used as a source in HandBrake.[10]
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