Encode movies with HandBrake
People looking for an easy way to encode their movie collection to a smaller file for storage on their computer, will find HandBrake the perfect program. It comes with a GUI that will fit the needs of both the unexperienced as the experienced. You will have a video file with chapters, audio and subtitles in no time. As opposed to a lot on my blog, Windows and OS X users can get HandBrake for their operating system too.
Not only the GUI makes it easier for you, the standard presets do as well. You don’t know what the good settings are for video playback on your iphone? No worries, simply use the iphone preset. There are presets available for other apple devices, gaming consoles, high/normal quality movies and animation videos. If one of the existing presets isn’t what you are looking for, you can create one for yourself so you don’t have to enter the same settings over and over again.
The most common codecs for both video and audio are included in HandBrake. All the popular containers are there too.
- Video codecs : H.264 (x264/MPEG-4 AVC), MPEG-4 ASP (Xvid and ffmpeg) and Theora.
- Audio codecs: AAC (faac), MP3 (lame), Vorbis and AC3 passthrough.
- Containers: mkv, avi, ogg, mp4 and m4v.
H.264 combined with AAC will give you the best quality and you can even tweak the settings of H.264 in a separate tab. For those that don’t know what settings they should use, I can recommend a slightly adapted version of the High Preset for films:
Not all H.264 options are included in the gui as this would overload the gui too much. The developpers do give you the possibility to add extra options manually though, a great feature indeed. For dxva compatible playback (your graphics card doing the decoding work), you can paste these settings in the manual options box:
ref=5:mixed-refs:bframes=3:weightb:direct=auto:b-pyramid:me=umh:8x8dct:partitions=all:vbv-bufsize=50000:vbv-maxrate=50000:trellis=2
Remember that encoding takes up a lot of time depending on the processor your computer is equiped with and the chosen settings.
I’m getting alot of artifacts and clipping when i use these settings rather than the default ones in Handbrake 0.9.3. I’m using Windows 7 RC1 64 bit on a Radeon HD3200 chipset to display the mkv file. Any suggestions?