The Handbrake Video Converter Just Got a Big Update

HandBrake, the free and open-source video converter and encoder, has released a new update. HandBrake 1.9 has improved support for Intel hardware, VP9 video, disc sources, and much more.

The new update adds support for Intel’s Quick Sync Video hardware decoder, which should boost performance in some operations on Intel-based PCs with Intel HD, Iris Xe, or Arc graphics. HandBrake’s documentation says it’s normal to see high CPU utilization in this mode, or even 100% CPU usage.

There’s also now support for lossless VP9 encoding, so you can export video files using HandBrake in the VP9 format without losing any video quality for the original source. That’s the opposite of typical lossy video encoding, which adds compression to the file to reduce the file size. As a result, lossless VP9 files are significantly bigger, so make sure you have enough drive space. VP9 is most often used as the video codec in WebM media files, and has been largely succeeded by AV1, but hardware support for AV1 still isn’t as common as with VP9.

HandBrake 1.9 also adds an Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) encoder, Vorbis pass-through support (though Vorbis has been succeeded by Opus), and improved scan for DTS audio profiles. There are two helpful upgrades for using HandBrake with physical media, too: a new preference for keeping duplicated Blu-ray titles, and a setting for the maximum duration of scan titles for disc-based sources.

There’s also a pile of bug fixes and smaller improvements. Issues with stopped queues and chapters have been fixed on Linux, and the Windows version now has several performance improvements on ARM devices. The quality of burned-in subtitles has been improved, and the developers fixed “a rare video corruption issue that could happen when burning-in subtitles.”

You can download HandBrake for Windows, Mac, and Linux from the official websites. It’s my personal favorite video converter, and this latest update makes it an even better tool.

Source: GitHub

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