14 DAY TRIAL // The HandBrake Team has released the newest version of its open source video transcoder for Mac, Windows, and Linux computers, adding H.265 and VP8 encoding, as well as tons of other tweaks and fixes.
Despite the modest version number, HandBrake 0.10 is actually a major new release packing a truckload of changes, albeit mostly under the hood.
General changes (i.e. all platforms)
The new HandBrake notably adds an H.265 encoder using x265 v1.4, with the team noting that it’s still in the early development stages, which is why users will be missing out on some H.265 features and optimizations for now. No word on when these important tools will be added. For MKV fans, a VP8 Encoder is now available in the app.
FAAC has been removed and the LibAV AAC encoder is now default. According to the developers, “This encoder is adequate for most, but until it improves a bit further, we have enabled support for the FDK-AAC encoder also. This FDK option is a temporary measure until the LibAV encoder improves. Note that FDK-AAC is much slower and will likely bottleneck the encode process, but will produce better quality audio.”
A handful of changes for Mac users
As usual, the development team points out some platform specific changes, including those targeting OS X customers in particular.
For users transcoding on a Mac, the changes include better support for OS X 10.9 (though nothing is mentioned for OS X 10.10), improved automatic audio and subtitle track selection behavior, improvements to the Auto-Naming feature, bug fixes and miscellaneous UI enhancements.
Lots more for Windows, including bad news
The release notes list a lot more tweaks and improvements for Windows users, including accessibility and usability improvements, and a draft of fixes in areas like the source dropdown, the Picture settings panel, Presets, and more.
The update marks the removal of Growl for Windows support due to bugs, and Windows XP is no longer supported as of version 0.10. “Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 or later is now a requirement,” according to the changelog. “The 32bit build of the application is now considered deprecated. This is due to 32bit process memory limitations.”
Ongoing improvements for Linux
As with Windows, the minimum requirements have been updated slightly. GTK3 is now mandatory to use HandBrake 0.10. Audio and subtitle track selection is improved here as well, and the same goes for Auto-Naming, Batch Add by list selection, Russian and Czech Translations, and more. The usual miscellaneous fixes and improvements are noted too.
Download HandBrake 0.10 for Mac OS X
