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HandBrake is a free and open source tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. HandBrake is a cross-platform application, available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

One of HandBrake’s strengths is its ability to open a wide variety of video formats. HandBrake uses FFmpeg under the hood and generally can open whatever FFmpeg will, in addition to disc-based formats like DVD and Blu-ray. HandBrake does not defeat or circumvent copy protection of any kind. It does not work with video files employing Digital Rights Management (DRM).

HandBrake’s software video encoders, video filters, audio encoders, and other processes benefit from fast CPU and memory. HandBrake’s hardware video encoders also benefit from modern GPU hardware.

Features

Built-in Device Presets: Get started with HandBrake in seconds by choosing a profile optimised for your device, or choose a universal profile for standard or high quality conversions. Simple, easy, fast. For those that want more choice, tweak many basic and advanced options to improve your encodes.

Supported Input Sources

Handbrake can process most common multimedia files and any DVD or Blu Ray sources that do not contain any kind of copy protection.

Outputs

  • File Containers: .MP4(.M4V) and .MKV
  • Video Encoders: H.265 (x265 and QuickSync), H.264(x264 and QuickSync), H.265 MPEG-4 and MPEG-2, VP8, VP9 and Theora
  • Audio Encoders: AAC / HE-AAC, MP3, Flac, AC3, or Vorbis
  • Audio Pass-thru: AC-3, E-AC3, DTS, DTS-HD, TrueHD, AAC and MP3 tracks

Even more features

  • Title / chapter and range selection
  • Batch Scan and Queueing of encodes
  • Chapter Markers
  • Subtitles (VobSub, Closed Captions CEA-608, SSA, SRT)
  • Constant Quality or Average Bitrate Video Encoding
  • Support for VFR and CFR
  • Video Filters: Deinterlacing, Decomb, Denoise, Detelecine, Deblock, Grayscale, Cropping and scaling
  • Live Static and Video Preview

What's New:

  • Updated Windows Beta to 20210404

General

  • Fixed ISO 639-2/B language codes not set correctly in MKV (affects Hebrew, Indonesian, Javanese, and Yiddish) (#2903)
  • Improved support for sources where pixel format cannot be quickly identified, e.g. due to delayed video track start (#2893)
  • Added logging to identify where hardware support is disabled
  • Miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements

Video

  • Improved Intel QSV memory footprint by eliminating a buffer pool (#2675)
  • Improved Intel QSV H.265 memory buffer size as required by newer Intel Media SDK (#2862)
  • Fixed and improved Intel QSV in various situations, especially hardware decoding (#873, #2660, #2661, #2829)
  • Fixed full range video being not being identified as limited range after conversion where filters are used (#2859)

Subtitles

  • Fixed handling of overlapping SSA import subtitles (791adba)
  • Improved support for out-of-order SSA subtitles as allowed by specification (#2906)

Command line interface

  • Fixed --preset failure unless full path is specified, e.g. --preset="Category Name/Preset Name" (#2838)

Build system

  • Improved Flatpak to better conform to freedesktop metainfo standards
  • Improved Intel QSV Flatpak plugin build effiency using cmake-ninja
  • Added a patch to fix cross compiling libdav1d using GCC 10.x (quality of life improvement)
  • Official HandBrake 1.3.3 Windows release is built using GCC 9.x and is not directly affected by this issue

Third-party libraries

  • Updated libraries
  • FFmpeg 4.2.3 (decoding and filters)

Mac

  • Fixed preview layout not displaying properly on OS X 10.11 El Capitan
  • Fixed incorrect copyright year on About dialog (#2830)

Windows

  • Fixed a crash related to the dark theme (#2816)
  • Fixed a potential crash related to preview image memory allocation (#2871)
  • Fixed a potential crash due to certain actions causing no preset being selected (#2875)
  • Fixed missing E-AC-3 encoder option (#2855)
  • Fixed hardware encoder support unavailable in portable build (#2832)
  • Miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements