Calling directly into the HandBrake library gives it a more rich UI than the official HandBrake Windows GUI.

Features:

• Multi-threaded
• MP4, MKV containers
• H.264 encoding with x264, the world's best video encoder
• Completely integrated encoding pipeline: everything is in one process and no huge intermediate temporary files
• MPEG-4, MPEG-2, Theora video
• AAC, MP3, Vorbis, AC3, FLAC audio encoding and AAC/AC3/MP3/DTS/DTS-HD passthrough
• Target bitrate, size or quality for video
• 2-pass encoding
• Decomb, detelecine, deinterlace filters
• Batch encoding
• Instant source previews
• Creates small encoded preview clips
• Pause, resume encoding

Prerequisites

You'll need .NET 4 (only the client profile is needed). If you don't have it, VidCoder will prompt you to download and install it. If you're on Windows 8 you shouldn't need to install anything; it has .NET 4 pre-installed.

You do not need to install HandBrake for VidCoder to work.

What's New:

• Fixed crash after canceling app close while encoding.
• Updated video bitrate calculation to take audio fallback into account.
• Video bitrate previews are now updated when audio settings are changed.
• Updated SQLite backend to pick up fix that caused VidCoder to crash when using a non-standard negative value specifier in Windows.
• Updated translations.
• Updated HandBrake core to 1.0.3, which fixes a handful of scan/encode bugs
• Added Bosnian translation, thanks to sunshineon.
• Fixed drag/drop scan to not lock the source window while scan is ongoing.
• Fixed issue where window states got unnecessarily saved on every startup.
• Added pickers! Pickers let you automatically choose titles, audio, subtitles and destination, as well as automatically queue or start encodes when a source is loaded. While encoding presets customize how a file is encoded, pickers control what is included in the file and where it goes. This also includes an overhaul of the existing audio and subtitle selection feature; it allows specifying multiple languages and has more flexibility in setting the default subtitle.
• Overhauled sizing UI.
  • Added padding support
  • Streamlined UI: No longer can specify both Width and Max Width, simply a checkbox to allow Anamorphic support, Custom Anamorphic gone in favor of Manual sizing
  • Moved rotation to Sizing tab
  • Renamed tabs Picture -> Sizing, Video -> Video Encoding
  • Removed Pixel Aspect Ratio information in input/output preview boxes if PAR is 1:1.
  • Sections within Sizing tab now wrap dynamically, supporting more window sizes.
• Added a collapsible left panel to the Encoding Preset window, to switch presets quickly.
• Added a built-in video player to the preview window. This can be disabled in Options -> General.
• Added CPU throttling option. This can limit the number of processor cores available to VidCoder for encoding.
• Added ability to pick which codecs are included with auto-passthrough and which are re-encoded.
• Moved audio fallback encoder to outside of the audio encoding, since it affects all encodings.
• All internal storage for presets, pickers, queues and window placements changed from XML to JSON. Saved presets and queues are now stored as .vjpreset and .vjqueue JSON files which are associated with VidCoder.
• Updated .NET Framework to 4.6 and added the ability to download and install the framework as part of the VidCoder install. Hopefully this means faster start times on x64 due to the new RyuJit engine.
• Scan progress now shows up on the taskbar icon.
• Queue import/export are now exposed on the CLI.
• Added ability to hibernate when completing an encode.
• Added option to close VidCoder after the encode queue completes with no errors.
• Added ability to send completed file to another program.
• Swapped to a simpler versioning scheme with two numbers.
• Removed deprecated x86 version. If you're using that on an x64 OS it will auto-upgrade you to the supported x64 version.
• Removed DXVA hardware decoding; it was most often slower and caused problems.
• Added a warning when there are a lot of titles with a similar duration. This helps identify discs authored with a bunch of phony titles and chapters mixed up.
• Changed the way the portable version locates the database file. It will now favor using the database file beside the portable executable rather than the one in %appdata%.
• Preview encode progress bar now correctly reflects total progress and does not reset when doing a subtitle scan or a 2-pass encode.
• Made log output to the window appear drastically faster.
• Changed log window to only scroll to the bottom on new logs if we were already at the bottom, so it doesn't pop you out if you scrolled away to look at something earlier in the log.
• File drag/drop now works on any window.
• We now back up database files when upgrading them and offer to restore them if the current database has a version that's too high. This allows you to downgrade back to an earlier version and keep your old presets.
• Added handling for a simple path argument directly on VidCoder.exe. This means you can drag a video onto its shortcut to launch VidCoder and open that file.
• Added automatic character set detection when adding SRT files. Gives a warning when the detection fails or doesn't match up with an available encoding.
• Added automatic cleanup of temporary handbrake files for times where the encoder or app crashed without graceful cleanup.
• The "Custom folder for previews" setting now also overrides the directory used for HandBrake's static previews.
• Updated to handle new HandBrake filter format, with named parameters. Added tooltips to the boxes to list the possible parameter names and to list the defaults when first opening.
• Updated to keep source video chapter names if they are present.
• Moved batch scans to the worker process to better protect against scan crashes when loading a large number of files.
• New translations
  • Georgian, thanks to Gela Mekoshkishvili.
  • Dutch, thanks to CSalat and Arco Keijzer.
  • Korean, thanks to sheppaul.
• Updated translations for other languages thanks to the 90+ translators at our Crowdin site
• ... and a bunch of bug fixes.
• Also, the new HandBrake core brought in a lot of goodies:
• VP9 video encoding via libvpx
• Intel QuickSync Video H.265/HEVC encoder (Requires Skylake or newer CPU)
• Ultra HD / 4K color pass through (support for BT.2020)
• 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
• Opus audio encoding/decoding via libopu
• Passthrough now supports E-AC-3, FLAC, and TrueHD audio formats