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HandBrake 1.0.0 Released After 13 Years Of Development (fossbytes.com)

Posted by msmash on from the about-time dept.

HandBrake, popular open source video transcoder, has finally hit version 1.0.0 affter spending roughly more than 13 years in development. HandBrake 1.0.0 brings tons of new presets and support for more devices and file types. From a report: HandBrake 1.0.0 comes with new web and MKV presets. The official presets from HandBrake 0.10.x can be found under 'Legacy.' New Jason-based preset system, including command line support, has been added. The additional features of HandBrake are title/chapter selection, queuing up multiple encodes, chapter markers, subtitles, different video filters, and video preview. Just in case you have a compatible Skylake or later CPU, Intel QuickSync Video H.265/HEVC encoder support brings performance improvements. HandBrake 1.0.0 also brings along new online documentation beta. It's written in a simple and easy-to-understand language.You can download it here.

6 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Beta versioning by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Is there some obscure point of pride for remaining in "beta" versioning for that long? What's the point of that? It's been quite functional and stable for many years now. Understating your version number is no better than Chrome and Firefox's ridiculous version number race, IMO. Not a huge deal, of course. I just wonder why this is a thing.

    Love Handbrake, but don't use it as often these days as I'm no longer buying and ripping my own DVDs or BluRays to my media server. Streaming is just too convenient.

    --
    Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    1. Re: Beta versioning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There's something ironic about the fact that it got out of beta long after the media it originally supported went extinct - it's a little late. For the rest of us we weren't really looking at the fact that it's V0.9 as being remotely significant and we've been using it anyway. Alpha, Beta, Early Access, these terms are all pretty useless now. V1.0 used to mean it's out of beta, QAed and ready for release as a working product. We see game titles that need patches on day 0. These labels don't work anymore.

      A version number is a monotonically increasing number. The only thing significant is that it goes up and only up. There's nothing significant about V1.0.

      We should just use Linux epoch time for version numbers.

    2. Re:Beta versioning by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      but don't use it as often these days as I'm no longer buying and ripping my own DVDs or BluRays to my media server.

      I use it more now than an ever. The switch to H.265 can save a lot of disk space so I use it to transcode some old under compressed stuff.

      Then there's Skype for business. In MS's infinite wisdom the current version of Skype saves HUGE files even at the lowest quality when recording meetings, and yet the defaults for Sharepoint limit files to 50MB (the company I work for is too big to get something like this changed). None the less you can easily get a 1 hour meeting with powerpoint down to below 50MB in H.264 with the right massaging in Handbrake.

  2. Re:Breaking by Existential+Wombat · · Score: 4, Funny

    Update. News at 11.1.

  3. Re:Still optimized for Intel by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Informative

    Oh really [intel.com]?

    Maybe you should read that article. And then maybe you should look into what Intel contributed.

    It's kind of hard to "cripple" AMD hardware that AMD doesn't have. Intel contributed a QSV capable codec to Handbrake. AMD are more than welcome to do so too, the source is open and I'm willing to bet Handbrake people wouldn't complain if AMD finally gave people a hardware encoder + code that worked for it.

  4. Re:Still optimized for Intel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is no source. HandBrake has never accepted money from Intel. Period. We don't get paid for the work we do.

    All our source code is public on GitHub. If there was anything malicious like this in there, it would be spotted pretty easily. It's not a huge code base.

    AMD VCE is hopefully going to be added some day. We did have initial patches from AMD, but they've changed directions with their libraries and the GPUOpen project so someone needs to find the time to re-do all that work.

    NVENC is also an option if it can be added in a GPL friendly way.