HandBrake Open Source video transcoder v0.10 released with hundreds of new features including H.265 and VP8 encoding

The developers of Handbrake just announced the 0.10 update to their extremely popular and useful Open Source video transcoding product. Originally focused on ripping DVDs, the product now can be used for transcribing many different types of files/codecs to almost any other. Today’s headliner updates include H.265 and VP8 encoding.

• The LibAV AAC encoder is now the default as FAAC has been removed.
  • This encoder is adequate for most, but until it improves a bit further, we have enabled support for the FDK-AAC encoder also.
    • This FDK option is a temporary measure until the LibAV encoder improves.
    • Note that FDK-AAC is much slower and will likely bottleneck the encode process, but will produce better quality audio.

• H.265 encoder
  • Using x265 v1.4
  • This encoder is still early in it’s development, so is missing many H.265 features and optimisations.

• Added VP8 Encoder (using libvpx)
  • Available in MKV files only.

Hit the download button in Handbrake or download here. Full change list below:

Encoders
We are introducing several new encoders with this release and replacing others.

• Intel QuickSync Video
  is a hardware based H.264 encoder that is available on Intel CPUs. Currently, QSV is only supported on Windows but we hope to bring this to Linux users in the future. Thanks to the good people at Intel for making this possible!
• H.265
  is now available through x265 1.4. While this encoder is still fairly new, we have seen some promising results come out of it. It’s still under heavy active development and is only going to improve over time!
• VP8
  using the libvpx encoder. We have now deprecated Theora (VP3) in favour of VP8 which is a more modern encoder offering better quality encodes at lower file sizes.
• LibFaac
  Has now officially been removed due to GPL compatibility issues, and replaced with the libav AAC encoder as the new default for Windows and Linux. In addition, we have added the FDK AAC encoder for Windows and Linux as a optional compile-time option. The Mac release will continue to use CoreAudio as the default.
• As usual, we’ve updated a number of the core libraries including x264 and libav

Filters and Scalers

• Denoise
  The new NLMeans filter offers much higher quality denoising. Our previous filter, hqdn3d, now accepts individual settings for each of the chroma channels (Cb, Cr).
• OpenCL Scaling
  In addition to the default Lanczos scaling algorithm, HandBrake now offers BiCubic scaling on Windows via OpenCL. If the results prove positive, we may roll it out to other platforms in a future release. Thanks to the guys at AMD for building our OpenCL framework!

GUIs

• Feature Parity
  A lot of work has been done to bring the user interfaces closer in terms of feature parity. We are now much closer than in any previous release.
• Audio and Subtitle Defaults
  The audio and subtitle controls have been overhauled to support default behaviours which can be stored in presets. This simplifies the workflow for many batch encoding scenarios.

There are literally hundreds of other improvements, so check out the release notes for more details.

If you happen to discover any bugs or issues please tell us about them in the bugs forum or let us know via our IRC channels.

Download HandBrake 0.10.0