HandBrake is a free, open source, cross-platform transcoding software that works on Mac, Windows or Linux.
The release of the new version of HandBrake 1.7.0, which arrives shortly after 11 months of development and in which support for new encoders has been added, as well as new presets, bug fixes and more.
For those who do not know about this application, they should know that it is geared for multithreaded transcoding of audio and video files, this is a multiplatform application so it can be used in OS X, GNU / Linux and Windows..
HandBrake uses third-party libraries, such as FFmpeg and FAAC. Handbrake it can process most common multimedia files and any source. The program can transcode BluRay/DVD video, copies of the VIDEO_TS directory and any file whose format is compatible with the FFmpeg/LibAV libavformat and libavcodec libraries.
Main new features of HandBrake 1.7.0
In this new version of HandBrake 1.7.0 that is presented by the of the improvements implemented for the Linux edition, it is mentioned that the drag and drop support for video scanning, as well as support for native file selectors through the xdg-desktop portal, import and export of XML chapters, also added bit depth and HDR information to the video summary and added a option to pause encoding when switched to battery power or when power saving mode is activated.
Other changes that stand out in this new version are that they added AV1 format encoders using AMD VCN and NVIDIA NVENC engines for acceleration, as well as support for multi-pass AV1 adaptive bit rate (ABR) encoding using the SVT-AV1 library
Regarding the optimization and performance improvements, it is mentioned thatImprovements have been made to ARM64 and Apple Silicon systems, HEVC decoding speed has also been improved, AV1 encoding performance has increased up to 4 times due to the use of new compilation optimizations in SVT-AV1 and Video conversion speed has been increased by eliminating unnecessary frame copies.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Improved forwarding of Dolby Vision metadata about brightness dynamic range.
- Added hardware presets for the Apple VideoToolbox API. Updated Creator and Social presets.
- Added the ability to save metadata of the environment used for display.
- Added filters based on the Intel QSV (Quick Sync Video) API for rotation and format analysis.
- The bwdif filter has been sped up by 30%.
- Added support for hardware accelerated x265 encoders with 10 bits per color channel support.
- Added Dolby Vision 8.4, 8.1, 7.6 and 5.0 profiles.
- Improved HDR10+ metadata forwarding when using x265 10-bit and SVT-AV1 encoders.
- Improved support for Intel QSV technology for hardware acceleration of video encoding and decoding on the Linux platform.
- When using NVENC technology, multi-pass encoding is disabled by default.
- Added support for the Meson build system.
- Added Queue > Add All Menu Option
- Added automatic file naming options: {codec} {bit depth} {width} {height} {modified date} {modified time}
- Removed obsolete update checker.
- Various bug fixes and improvements
Finally, if you want to know more about it, you can check the complete changelog by going to to the following link.
How to install Handbrake on Ubuntu and derivatives from PPA?
For those who are interested in being able to install this new version, they can do so from the application's PPA where we can obtain the application updates in a faster way, than compared to the previous method.
For this we are going to open a terminal and we are going to execute the following commands.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-releases
We update our list of repositories with:
sudo apt-get update
And finally we install the application with:
sudo apt-get install handbrake
How to install Handbrake from snap?
Now if you don't want to add repositories to your system and you have the support to install applications in snap format, you can install HandBrake with the help of this technology, you just have to open a terminal and execute the following command:
sudo snap install handbrake-jz
If they want to install a release candidate version of the program, they do so using this command:
sudo snap install handbrake-jz --candidate
To install the beta version of the program, use this command:
sudo snap install handbrake-jz --beta
Now if you already have the application installed by this method, to update it just execute this command:
sudo snap refresh handbrake-jz