I noticed Berry120 had mentioned Handbrake to another member and found myself curious about it. I downloaded a copy and had a look.
First thing I noticed is it's not real user friendly. It takes too much putzing around with it to get it to work. Once you figure it out it does the job. One at a time.
Sure thing, it's not *that* user friendly once you go beyond its presets - but it's incredibly powerful, and that's mainly why I use it. As you point out, once you figure out what to do it's fine.
Ok questions:
1> A there any other formats it can do besides MKV and MP4?
Nope. AVI support was discontinued long ago (it's a crappy old container format anyway.) If you really want it then you can grab an older version and use that to encode - I tend to use MKV for everything these days, it's well supported and incredibly flexible.
2> Can it do multiple conversions? (More than one at a time?)
It can queue conversions up - just hit "add to queue" when you've got your settings in there and it'll add it to the conversion queue. It can't do more than one at once, but there would be little point since it maxes out the CPU anyway (so the net effect would be that you'd get, say two encodes that take twice as long to complete rather than one encode available after half the time, and the other available after the full time.)
Before any one says RTFM, I did RTFM. Maybe I missed something maybe not. Asking some one that uses it already, for me, is a lot quicker than sorting through all that techno babble.
Nothing wrong with that!
I normally use GomEncoder to do the heavy lifting. It can do 4 at a time and has a multitude of formats it can read and convert to. Catch is it's 34.95usd. I have a license that I forgot about that was on my laptop. They let me transfer it off the lappy to the desk rig. I encoded 8 2 hour movies in less than 2 hours. Keeping in mind computer horsepower has a lot to do with that.
But I'm always on the lookout for freeware that can do the job.
What format do you need to convert to? If you have the need to convert to something other than what handbrake supports then this may well be better for your purposes. However, everything that I convert goes into MKV contained h264, and for that I haven't found anything better than handbrake.
In terms of speed, chances are it's single threaded which is why it's doing 4 concurrently (handbrake uses x264 underneath which is arguably the best h264 encoder out there, and will make use of all available cores. GOM may use the same thing.) It gets quite hard to compare speed unless you know exactly what encoding settings are being used - and this is where things get a bit tricky if you're comparing with different encoders.
The default handbrake settings make a good speed / efficiency trade off, but you can change this if you wish - you may want to bookmark
this page with settings you can paste into handbrake to mimic the x264 preset settings. (Head over to the advanced tab in handbrake to paste them in in the text box at the bottom.) Personally I encode everything on veryslow, since my computer stays on pretty much constantly and I don't really care how long these things take to complete (I would use placebo, but you're talking ~ 0.001% increase in quality / file size for an encode time that stretches over 10x longer than the veryslow preset.) If encode time is a priority, then feel free to go up the other way (though if you get to ultrafast I'd say you've gone too far!)
Generally if I want to transcode with handbrake, I'll do the following:
- If it's a DVD / Blu-ray, rip with MakeMKV to extract the disc onto the hard drive and remove all encryption (apart from a broken disc, haven't found anything that MakeMKV fails at.) You could stop there, this gives you a playable uncompressed MKV, but the next steps will dramatically reduce the file size without (if you're careful) any noticeable degradation in quality.
- Take the file to transcode, drag it into handbrake, and set the output file (I usually use MKV and x264.)
- Use "constant quality" (default) and drag the slider up from 20 to 18 (that's right, it works in reverse, this is an increase in quality!) To start with I didn't do this but found that in some action films I saw noticeable blocking in some of the fast scenes, this combined with the veryslow preset has all but eliminated that issue.
- Head to the audio tab, and select the "Auto pass thru" option to make sure any surround sound is preserved and not downmixed to 2.1 (had to re-encode a lot of DVDs when I didn't do this the first time around!)
- Head over to the advanced panel and in the text box at the bottom, copy the following to mimic the veryslow preset:
ref=16:bframes=8:b-adapt=2:direct=auto:me=umh:merange=24:subq=10:rc-lookahead=60:analyse=all:trellis=2
- Hit the start button.
- If you've got more than one thing to encode, repeat from the beginning, only this time hit the "add to queue" button instead of the "start" button.
Of course, that's by no means the one and only way to do things, and handbrake's default settings are acceptable, but if you want consistently good rips and don't mind leaving the computer running for long periods of time, then to me this is a good option. I've had mine running for days on end encoding lots of 1080p Blu-ray series this way, but you only need to do it once and the resulting quality in my mind makes it more than worth it. Whenever I get a DVD or Blu-ray now, it gets ripped via this method, using entirely free software, and while the results can take a while I've yet to see any other combination in the free or paid domain that can beat it (other formats and file types aside, of course.) All the files then get loaded onto the media server so I can browse and watch all the films I own, legally, without looking for any discs or (in the case of Blu-ray) waiting a million years for the damn thing to load.
When I have needed things more quickly to watch, I've generally used the "faster" setting to get what I want temporarily, and then run the same job on "veryslow" for cataloguing later.
When h265 (HEVC) support becomes widespread, I'll hopefully move over to that and further improve the quality per disk space (could halve disk space for some films if the early demos are anything to go by.) That's a while off yet though!
Any questions, just shout!
