HandBrake is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

transcoder for

digital video Digital video is an electronic representation of moving visual images (video) in the form of encoded digital data. This is in contrast to analog video, which represents moving visual images in the form of analog signals. Digital video comprises ...

files. It was originally developed in 2003 by Eric Petit to make

ripping Ripping is the extraction of digital content from a container, such as a CD, onto a new digital location. Originally, the term meant to rip music from Commodore 64 games. Later, the term was applied to ripping WAV or MP3 files from digital audio ...

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...

s to a

data storage device Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted form ...

easier. HandBrake's backend contains comparatively little original code; the program is an integration of many

third-party Third party may refer to: Business * Third-party source, a supplier company not owned by the buyer or seller * Third-party beneficiary, a person who could sue on a contract, despite not being an active party * Third-party insurance, such as a veh ...

audio and video

libraries A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

, both

codecs A codec is a computer hardware or software component that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder o ...

(such as

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing vide ...

x264 x264 is a free and open-source software library and a command-line utility developed by VideoLAN for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding format. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Histo ...

, and

x265 x265 is an encoder for creating digital video streams in the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) video compression format developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC). It is available as a command-line app or a softwa ...

) and other components such as video deinterlacers (referred to as "filters"). These are collected in such a manner to make their use more effective and accessible (e.g., so that a user does not have to transcode a video's audio and visual components in separate steps, or with inaccessible

command-line A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user-friendly alternativ ...

utilities). HandBrake clients are available for

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

, and

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

History

Early versions

HandBrake was originally developed by Eric Petit in 2003 as software for BeOS, before being ported to other systems. He continued to be the primary developer until April 2006, when the last official

Subversion Subversion () refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system in place are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to sabotage the established social order and its structures of Power (philosophy), power, authority, tradition, h ...

revision was committed. Petit continued to be active on the HandBrake forum for a brief period after. From May–June 2006, no one in the HandBrake community was successful in contacting Petit, and no further code changes were officially made.

MediaFork

In September 2006, Rodney Hester and Chris Long had been independently working to extract the H.264

video compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression ...

format from Apple's

iPod The iPod is a series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices that were designed and marketed by Apple Inc. from 2001 to 2022. The iPod Classic#1st generation, first version was released on November 10, 2001, about mon ...

firmware (1.2) through

reverse engineering Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accompl ...

before meeting on the HandBrake forum. Since their work was complementary, they began working together to develop an unstable, but still compileable, release of HandBrake supporting the H.264 format. Hester and Long made progress in terms of stability, functionality, and

look and feel In software design, the look and feel of a graphical user interface comprises aspects of its design, including elements such as colors, shapes, layout, and typefaces (the "look"), as well as the behavior of dynamic elements such as buttons, boxes ...

, but it was not possible to submit their patch to the HandBrake subversion repository without authorization from Petit. Unable to submit their revisions as a successor to HandBrake, Hester created a subversion repository mirroring HandBrake's final subversion (0.7.1) on the HandBrake website and began development on top of that. Hester and Long named the new project MediaFork.

From 2007

On February 13, 2007, Hester and Long were contacted by Petit, who informed them of his support and encouraged them to continue developing. Plans were then made to reintegrate MediaFork as a direct successor to HandBrake. The MediaFork website and forums were moved to HandBrake's, and the next release was officially named HandBrake. On December 24, 2016, after more than 13 years of development, HandBrake 1.0.0 was released. There is another transcoder, called VidCoder, that uses HandBrake as its encoding engine.

Features

Hardware acceleration

Some

GPUs A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

(including GPUs physically integrated with

CPUs A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary Processor (computing), processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes Instruction (computing), instructions ...

, referred to by

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

APUs Apus is a small constellation in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere, southern sky. It represents a bird-of-paradise, and its name means "without feet" in Greek language, Greek because the bird-of-paradise was once wrongly believed to lack feet. ...

) contain dedicated hardware for video encoding and decoding ( Intel's Quick Sync Video, Nvidia's NVENC, or AMD's Video Coding Engine / Video Core Next). This hardware is usually provided for scenarios where quick and power-efficient compressed video is desired, such as

videoconferencing Videotelephony (also known as videoconferencing or video calling) is the use of audio signal, audio and video for simultaneous two-way communication. Today, videotelephony is widespread. There are many terms to refer to videotelephony. ''Vide ...

and

streaming video Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos, television shows and films digitally on request. These multimedia are accessed without a traditional video playback device and a typical static broadcasting ...

. It is less often used for transcoding like that performed by HandBrake because its compression efficiency can rarely match that of an optimized software encoder for the same codec, but HandBrake still provides the owners of compatible hardware (who are willing to accept the tradeoff) with the option of hardware encoding. Quick Sync was added in November 2014 with version 0.10.0, while NVENC and the VCE became supported in version 1.2.0, released in December 2018. (HandBrake supports both the VCE and the newer VCN, but its interface only mentions the VCE by name, even if VCN hardware is present or a codec is being used that is too new to have VCE support.)

Transcoding

Users can customize the output by altering the

bit rate In telecommunications and computing, bit rate (bitrate or as a variable ''R'') is the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time. The bit rate is expressed in the unit bit per second (symbol: bit/s), often in conjunction ...

, maximum file size or bit rate and sample rate via "constant quality". HandBrake supports adaptive

deinterlacing Deinterlacing is the process of converting interlaced video into a non-interlaced or Progressive scan, progressive form. Interlaced video signals are commonly found in analog television, VHS, Laserdisc, digital television (HDTV) when in the 1080 ...

scaling Scaling may refer to: Science and technology Mathematics and physics * Scaling (geometry), a linear transformation that enlarges or diminishes objects * Scale invariance, a feature of objects or laws that do not change if scales of length, energ ...

, detelecine, and cropping, both automatic and manual.

Batch

HandBrake supports batch encoding through

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

(GUI) and

command-line interface A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via command (computing), commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user ...

(CLI). Third-party scripts and UIs exist specifically for this purpose, such as ''HandBrake Batch Encoder'', ''VideoScripts'', and ''Batch HandBrake''. All make use of the CLI to enable queueing of several files in a single directory.

Sources

HandBrake transcodes video and audio from nearly any format to a handful of modern ones, but it does not defeat or circumvent copy protection. One form of input is

DVD-Video DVD-Video is a consumer video format used to store digital video on DVDs. DVD-Video was the dominant consumer home video format in most of the world in the 2000s. As of 2024, it competes with the high-definition Blu-ray Disc, while both rece ...

stored on a DVD, in an ISO image of a DVD, or on any

as a VIDEO_TS folder. As with DVDs, HandBrake does not directly support the decryption of

Blu-ray disc Blu-ray (Blu-ray Disc or BD) is a Digital media, digital optical disc data storage format designed to supersede the DVD format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released worldwide on June 20, 2006, capable of storing several hours of ...

s. However, HandBrake can be used to transcode a Blu-ray disc if DRM is first removed using a third-party application.

Support

Input

(from disc or ISO image) *

Matroska Matroska (styled Matroška) is a project to create a container format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture, or subtitle tracks in one file. The Matroska Multimedia Container is similar in concept to other containers like ...

(MKV) *

Audio Video Interleave Audio Video Interleave (also Audio Video Interleaved and known by its initials and filename extension AVI, usually pronounced ) is a proprietary multimedia container format and Windows standard introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as p ...

(AVI) *

MPEG-4 Part 14 MP4 (formally MPEG-4 Part 14), is a digital multimedia container format most commonly used to store video and audio, but it can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images. Like most modern container formats, it allows ...

(MP4) *

MPEG Transport Stream MPEG transport stream (MPEG-TS, MTS) or simply transport stream (TS) is a standard digital container format for transmission and storage of audio, video, and Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP) data. It is used in broadcast syst ...

(TS) * BDAV MPEG-2 Transport Stream (M2TS)

Output

Container formats *

(MP4) * iTunes Video (M4V) *

(MKV) * AVI (up to version 0.9.3) *

WebM WebM is an audiovisual media file format. It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML video and the HTML audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponsored by ...

Video formats * H.264 using

, Nvidia NVENC, Intel QSV and AMD VCE * H.265/HEVC using

, Nvidia NVENC, Intel QSV and AMD VCE * MPEG-4 ASP using libav *

MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods ...

using libav *

Theora Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It was developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg contai ...

using libtheora *

VP8 VP8 is an open format, open and royalty-free Video coding format, video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008. Initially released as a Proprietary software, proprietary successor to On2's previous VP7 format, VP8 was released a ...

and VP9 using

libvpx libvpx is a free software video codec library from Google and the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). It serves as the reference software implementation for the VP8 and VP9 video coding formats, and for AV1 a special fork named libaom that ...

* AV1 using SVT-AV1 and Intel Quick Sync Video * FFV1 Audio formats *

Advanced Audio Coding Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. It was developed by Dolby, AT&T, Fraunhofer and Sony, originally as part of the MPEG-2 specification but later improved under MPEG-4.ISO (2006ISO/ ...

(AAC) using libav for Windows and Linux or using CoreAudio in macOS * HE-AAC (till version 0.10.3 for Windows and Linux), using CoreAudio on macOS * AC-3 *

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software ...

16-bit and 24-bit * MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III (MP3) * Opus *

Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder ( codec) for lossy audio compression, libvorbis. Vorbis is most comm ...

* TrueHD *

Apple Lossless Audio Codec The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC, ), also known as Apple Lossless, or Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE), is an audio coding format, and its reference audio codec implementation, developed by Apple for lossless data compression of digital music. ...

(ALAC) 16-bit and 24-bit * Pass-through for AAC, AC-3, DTS, DTS-HD, E-AC-3, FLAC, MP3, ALAC, and TrueHD

Reception

In 2011, Preston Gralla of

PC World ''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online-only publication. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tec ...

praised HandBrake for its feature set: "Advanced users will be pleased at the number of options." However, he criticized the usability for new users: "Note that HandBrake isn't necessarily the easiest program to use. It has a large number of options available, and there's no good explanation of what they do or how to use them. Beginners should stick with the defaults". He concluded by calling HandBrake a "solid choice" for people who are looking for a free video transcoder. In 2013,

Lifehacker ''Lifehacker'' is a weblog about life hacks and software that launched on 31 January 2005. The site was originally launched by Gawker Media and is owned by Ziff Davis. The blog posts cover a wide range of topics including Microsoft Windows, M ...

.com visitors voted HandBrake as the most popular video converter over four other candidates by a wide margin.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Handbrake Cross-platform free software Free software for Linux Free software for Windows Free software for macOS DVD rippers Free software programmed in C Free software programmed in C Sharp Free software programmed in Objective-C Free software projects Free video conversion software MacOS multimedia software Software that uses FFmpeg Software that uses GStreamer Software that uses GTK Video software that uses GTK Windows multimedia software 2003 software