HandBrake was originally available on the BeOS, but now has been ported over to MacOS X and to GNU/Linux.

Features:

• Can encode directly from DVDs (even encrypted ones) or from VIDEO_TS folders
• Supports AC3, LPCM and MPEG audio tracks
• Outputs MP4, AVI or OGM files
• Outputs AAC, MP3 or Vorbis audio
• Supports 2*pass encoding
• Supports encoding of two audio tracks
• Includes a bitrate calculator
• Supports picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling

What's New:

General

• 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 (over 1700 code commits!)

Video

• 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

Audio

• Opus audio encoding/decoding via libopus
• Passthru now supports E-AC-3, FLAC, and TrueHD audio formats

Subtitles

• Improved subtitles rendering for some languages via HarfBuzz
• Miscellaneous subtitles improvements

Command line interface

• Presets can now be imported and exported from the command line and are compatible with the graphical interfaces
• Queue exported from the graphical interfaces can now be imported by the command line interface (Linux and Windows only for now)

Build system

• Add scripts to manually build and install Mac and MinGW-w64 (compile for Windows on Linux) toolchains
• Add support for multiple source URLs for third-party downloads
• Add SHA256 hash verification for third-party downloads
• Add configure parameter to disable or filter allowed third-party downloads (see configure --help)
• Use HTTPS everywhere; the few cases where a third-party does not provide packages over https, handbrake.fr does
• New targets on Mac to install and uninstall after building
• Add flatpak packaging support (experimental)

Third-party libraries

• Updated libraries
  • FreeType 2.6.5 (subtitles)
  • Fontconfig 2.12.1 (subtitles)
  • FriBidi 0.19.7 (subtitles)
  • Libav 12 (encoding/decoding/muxing)
  • libass 0.13.2 (subtitles)
  • libbluray 0.9.3 (Blu-ray decoding)
  • libmfx v6.0.0 (Intel QuickSync Video encoding/decoding)
  • libvpx 1.5.0 (VP8/VP9 video encoding)
  • x264 148 r2708 (H.264/AVC video encoding)
  • x265 2.1 (H.265/HEVC video encoding)
• New libraries
  • HarfBuzz 1.3.0 (subtitles)
  • libopus 1.1.3 (Opus audio encoding)

Linux

• Add options for saving and loading queue files
• Removed system tray icon due to performance issues on Ubuntu
• Usability improvements
• Miscellaneous bug fixes

Mac

• Updated all tooltips
• Added undo/redo support to the graphical interface
• Improved drag and drop support
• Added Open Recent to the File menu
• Added Add Titles to Queue... to the File menu (batch queueing)
• Preview prompts to open in an external application when the internal player does not support the format
• Preview now displays volume and audio/subtitles language selection during playback
• Picture and Filters settings are now part of the main window
• Settings are preserved when selecting a new title (instead of reloading the last selected preset)
• Improved support for importing/exporting comma-separated (.csv) chapter markers
• Queue is now automatically paused when available disk space is low
• When Done action can now be changed directly from the Queue window
• When Done notification is now interactive (reveals the encoded file in Finder)
• Activity Log window is now searchable (press "?"+"f" to activate)
• XQuartz is no longer required for subtitle burn-in
• Updated Sparkle software update library
  • Enabled DSA signature checking for improved security
• Usability improvements
• Miscellaneous bug fixes

Windows

• Graphical interface now uses libhb directly, instead of sending commands to the command line interface
  • Encoding can now be paused and resumed
  • Stopping encoding will finalize the partial file to be playable
• Reduced installer and install size
  • The command line interface is no longer included in the graphical interface installer
• Update checker now verifies the signature of the update file for improved security
• Added support for quality-based audio encoding
• Added ability to import tab-separated (.tsv), XML (.xml), and plain text (.txt) chapter markers
• Improved the "configure default" options for audio and subtitles
  • Default audio track behavior is now configurable
  • Subtitles burn-in behavior is now configurable
• Removed DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) hardware-accelerated video decoding
  • Was causing many issues without providing sufficient improvement to decoding efficiency
  • May be added again at a later date if performance and stability improves
• Usability improvements
• Miscellaneous bug fixes