TUAW's Daily Mac App: HandBrake
Open-source software is a beautiful thing. It's free, community driven, and more often than not, incredibly useful. HandBrake, one of the best video converters around, is a classic example of great open-source software.
The Swiss army knife of video converters and a perennial TUAW favorite, HandBrake is a Mac users best friend. Using libavformat and libacvodec, it'll take almost any video format or container you want to throw at it and convert it into something more useful. Want to convert a video for playback on an Apple TV? No problem. Open the offending video file, select "AppleTV" (version 1 or 2 depending on your model) from the preset list under "Apple" and click the "Start" button.
If you want to get a bit more involved than simply using presets you can tweak almost every video and audio conversion setting available. From bitrate, FPS and target size, to video and audio codec, embedding of subtitles and breaking-down the video into chapters, you can do it all with HandBrake.
HandBrake is available for the Mac, Windows and Linux, but on a Mac it's 64-bit, multithreaded and will use all of the available resources of your modern Intel-based machine. That means conversions are fast and efficient. If you've got a video file and you need something to covert it then HandBrake is the tool you need. It won't decrypt things, so if you're trying to rip a DVD or something similar, you'll need a tool to remove the copy protection first, but that video of your mate jumping the gate you shot won't know what hit it.
Download HandBrake for free from the HandBrake Project website.
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Source: http://handbrake.fr/
Open-source software is a beautiful thing. It's free, community driven, and more often than not, incredibly useful. HandBrake, one of...
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The article is incorrect when it states that HandBrake will not decrypt DVDs. HandBrake will rip any store bought DVD you throw at it with no problems, encrypted or not.
July 08 2011 at 8:03 AM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down ReplyI'm afraid it doesn't support decryption of copy-protected DVDs anymore. It use to, but won't do it on its own anymore: https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/Sources
That doesn't mean it can't use VLC to do it, but according to the Handbrake project's site, the article is correct I'm afraid.
When I convert TV shows from DVD to my iPod, I have to set them up as TV shows and give them their name with iTunes. It'd be really nice if handbrake could write that meta data into the file before hand. Anyone else solved this problem
July 08 2011 at 1:03 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplySearch for the app MetaX. That'll let you populate all the metadata (even searching the Internet for info as well) then import into iTunes.
July 08 2011 at 1:37 AM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down ReplyHandbrake is a great converter, but is there a hardware accelerated app out there that would take advantage of say a Nvidia GPU on a Mac?
July 07 2011 at 10:55 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI love handbrake as well. I have spent a lot of time working with it, but it would be incredibly useful if you guys could write a really in depth article on exactly how to tweak handbrake to do what you want. There are a lot of in depth settings that you can play around with, and very little guidance on the internet on what they all do and why you would use them. I personally would love a really in depth review (even broken in to multiple parts) on how to use handbrake to its fullest. I think a lot of other people would love it too.
July 07 2011 at 8:28 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyIs there anything in particular you want to do? Because for the most part the presets work great for all things Mac.
July 08 2011 at 3:04 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Replywhat settings are best to convert DVD to iPad?
July 07 2011 at 5:57 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Replyjust use Apple TV setting
July 07 2011 at 6:17 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyNot sure that's ideal. I have a bunch of DVDs here (Holland) and the format is region 2, PAL. Handbrake's AppleTV2 format is NTSC, so I have to change it to "use original source", but I still get interlace artifacts when ripping DVDs that were originally shot on video (The Civil War dvd collection, for example, or the movie Anvil - and yes, I own both). So I'm futzing about trying to get these disks to rips satisfactorily without much success...
July 08 2011 at 5:33 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate downwhat settings are recommended to convert DVD for iPad?
July 07 2011 at 5:56 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply
jason
The only problem I have with it is the converted movies do not look that great on my big tv. the picture is def a little destorted
July 07 2011 at 5:26 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyOne huge problem Handbreak needs to work on is on the volume, at times the recordings are too low. Other than that it is my go to app for ripping DVD's (489 movies and counting.)
July 07 2011 at 4:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplySorry for being a total idiot, i asked this months before, but I don't know where. I NEVER managed to grab a whole movie with Handbrake. If i insert a DVD, I can select which part of the movie it will rip and convert, but there is NO option (or at least I don't see any) to add parts together or say "please convert all the stuff into one file". Please explain to me how this works :/
July 07 2011 at 4:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyAs long as you select the right title and make sure all chapters are selected (which normally happens by default) it SHOULD rip the whole movie. I've only ripped movies a couple times, usually just TV shows, but I've never had a problem with it ripping incorrectly unless I accidentally had the wrong title selected.
July 07 2011 at 5:48 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyIn the dvd there are usually multiple "titles". These include the actual film, any bonus material, trailers, etc. on seperate titles. Handbrake's default settings are to scan all these titles and find the longest one (the film) and encode all of the included chapters of that title (the whole film). This works most of the time...
As a copy protection method, some DVDs will contain fake unused titles. These are usually actual film chapters in the wrong order, or random other pieces that throw off programs like handbrake. In order to encode the film and not a bogus title, open the DVD using the default DVD player app and go through the onscreen menus until you get to the actual film. Once the film is playing, open the "Go" menu and scroll to 'Title'. This will tell you the title number you should encode in Handbrake.
This can also be problematic for encoding DVDs of TV shows because each episode is listed as a separate title.
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By threat, thanks TÚAW. I typed this long reply all out on my iPad, hit the submit button, only to have it disappear because of the awful login system...
*by the way* (that one is all on me).
July 08 2011 at 12:05 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate downHandbrake does a great job of selecting a video, specifying the settings, and either converting it or adding it to the queue.
What it doesn't do as well (and VisualHub did this seamlessly) was to drag a bunch of files onto the app, and they all get queued up. Often I want to take an entire folder of files and convert it to 'AppleTV' format - I don't want to configure them one-by-one.
You can get HandBrake Batch to do this. Its free I think.
I was using iviPro to convert / populate the metadata, but I've found its faster to just use handbrake (/batch) to convert and then populate the metadata only with iviPro.
MKS
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TUAW (or The Unofficial Apple Weblog) is a website devoted to tips, reviews, news, analysis and opinion on everything Apple.
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