I’ve mentioned Handbrake a couple of times over the year as an excellent, free video encoding and DVD ripping program. I often use Handbrake not just to get movies onto my computer and for cross-encoding, but it also makes a great real world benchmark for a computer’s CPU performance. When I first got my Macbook Pro, I used Handbrake as an indication of the tangible performance advantage I had over my old iMac G5. I wasn’t disappointed.
What is so wonderful about Handbrake is its open source roots. The entire software is based on the efforts of volunteer software designers and an active community of contributors. It’s great to see a vibrant, volunteer-based effort like this yield such a great product. But it has its downsides. First off, despite being in development for over 5 years, the software has yet to reach 1.0 status, so it is technically still in beta. As well, releases are very slow. The previous version – 0.9.4 – was released a year after its predecessor and the newest release was about 13 months after that. That’s why the release of 0.9.5 is so exciting for me: because it shows progress continues on. After a year with nary a peep from the developers, I would fear that the project was dead. This appears to not be the case.
The most important updates to the software come in the form of new “presets”. Handbrake makes converting to iTunes and iPod-friendly video a snap with multiple configurations to maximize quality or file size depending on needs. The newest version takes into account advancements in Apple’s hardware – namely the introduction of the iPhone 4 and iPad, with their support for 720p video and high resolutions. These new settings are great for me, as they essentially use the same settings as the custom preset I built for my DVD rips and cross-encodings.
Download Handbrake today at their website: Handbrake.fr. Versions exist for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and OSX, even Linux and a Command Line Interface version. Make sure to download the latest version of VLC player too if you want to rip DVDs (contains some libraries that Handbrake needs to access DVDs).
Digital Gravitas 