I ask as someone who uses ffmpeg regularly, what does Handbrake offer over ffmpeg?
If you don't run ffmpeg all the time, this makes it easy. Pop in a DVD click a few buttons, and it's ready for your iPad. Try it!
HandBrake 1.0.0 Released
21–30 of 181 posts
Re: HandBrake 1.0.0 Released
#22I ask as someone who uses ffmpeg regularly, what does Handbrake offer over ffmpeg?
Handbrake offers you literally a GUI over ffmpeg. And sane defaults, setting ffmpeg gets overwhelming fast.
And also some nice queue management, a bit better than what you'd get from shell scripting.
The downside is that it's a GUI.
Re: HandBrake 1.0.0 Released
#23I love Handbrake. It's my goto for video transcoding. I often download stuff for my children from YouTube using a YouTube downloader, and then transcode them to the ideal iPad format, so the children can watch stuff in the car on the iPad without an internet connection. Great for long trips.
An iPad can't play regular MP4/H264 videos by default?
It can, but you can optimize the encoding so that the iPad needs to do less work playing the video.
Re: HandBrake 1.0.0 Released
#24I'm a huge fan of HandBrake and excited to see them still improving the application. The last time I used a DVD ripper was >5 years ago but it was an essential tool for me earlier in life. I'm happy to see I will still have it available should I need to use it.
Re: HandBrake 1.0.0 Released
#25Wow, I used to use this many years ago when ripping DVDs was a thing and also for the occasional transcode to mkv. I had no idea it was still in development. I'll have to check it out again.
Why transcode just to package media into an mkv container? Mkv is pretty much codec agnostic, you could probably just steam copy. You'll save a lot of time and audio-visual quality by doing so.
Re: HandBrake 1.0.0 Released
#26I ask as someone who uses ffmpeg regularly, what does Handbrake offer over ffmpeg?
I've used to work with a team that used HandBrake for transcoding - from what one of the developers told me HandBrake handles weird video formats better. Some of the videos would have troubles with ffmpeg which would produce "broken" transcoded videos, videos without audio and some other issues that I don't remember now. Myself personally, I feel quite comfortable with ffmpeg and I never had any problems with it so w…
The issues you bring up are not deficiencies with ffmpeg, but rather the user. One can prevent all of the issues you cited with the correct ffmpeg commands and an understanding of how media codecs and containers work.
Re: HandBrake 1.0.0 Released
#27HandBrake is one of those pieces of software that I've never even had to consider looking around to find something slightly better, it's always done what its supposed to with no fuss. A while back I wanted to rip a DVD my kids got so they could watch it on their tablets and downloading HandBrake was such a no brainer that I entirely forgot that I don't have an optical drive built into any of my computers anymore before installing it.
Re: HandBrake 1.0.0 Released
#28Wow, I used to use this many years ago when ripping DVDs was a thing and also for the occasional transcode to mkv. I had no idea it was still in development. I'll have to check it out again.
Why transcode just to package media into an mkv container? Mkv is pretty much codec agnostic, you could probably just steam copy. You'll save a lot of time and audio-visual quality by doing so.
I transcode because H.264 saves me a lot of space over MPEG 2. I don't notice the quality loss but I do notice the disk space and faster file transfers.
Re: HandBrake 1.0.0 Released
#29...Wait, it wasn't 1.0 already?
Could've fooled me...
Re: HandBrake 1.0.0 Released
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've used to work with a team that used HandBrake for transcoding - from what one of the developers told me HandBrake handles weird video formats better. Some of the videos would have troubles with ffmpeg which would produce "broken" transcoded videos, videos without audio and some other issues that I don't remember now. Myself personally, I feel quite comfortable with ffmpeg and I never had any problems with it so w…
The issues you bring up are not deficiencies with ffmpeg, but rather the user. One can prevent all of the issues you cited with the correct ffmpeg commands and an understanding of how media codecs and containers work.
I'm sure that correct ffmpeg commands for various containers would prevent issues, however HandBrake does that out of the box for all the formats that company was using with one command. I don't know specific details, however I do know that ffmpeg was used for quite some time before team decided to switch to HandBrake after running tests on thousands of normal and problematic files.