Third Handbrake Snapshot Released

The third snapshot of the DVD conversion software known as Handbrake has been released. The big news this time is the inclusion of a recent revision of the x264 encoding engine. No 0.9.4 in sight yet, but we’re close to a year now since 0.9.3 so I figure it cant be that long…

[Edit 11/6: The fifth snapshot has been released]

The x264 encoding engine is the basis for handbrake – it does all the heavy lifting in the video conversion from whatever source to H.264. A revision made to x264 back in August changed the way the encoder will use its bits to encode the image, and results in a higher quality picture for the same bitrate. One fantastic example of this is an animated movie from Japan streaming at 67kb/s (thats slightly faster than what a 56k modem could deliver in the late 90s), the quality isn’t the best, but the video holds together (no macroblocking or other major artifacts) at such a low bitrate.

Unfortunately, there have been a lot of posts in the HB forum since 10.6 came out about the inclusion of OpenCL or GrandCentral technologies. First, Handbrake is not the appropriate place for them – as I said above x264 is where the heavy lifting is done and that’s where these types of technologies would be implemented. While there are GPU assisted video encoding technologies out there, the problem is that they don’t produce quality output. You might get a result faster but it doesn’t look as good as what you’ll get from x264 (and x264 keeps getting faster with better output).

You can get a list of the other major changes at the forum announcement, and download it here.