This article is for an older version of HandBrake. All versions.

Dieser Artikel ist für eine ältere Version von HandBrake. Alle Versionen.

Video Codecs

H.264 (x264): For MPEG-4 part 10, also known as H.264/AVC.
- This is HandBrakes default encoder. It provides excellent performance, filesizes and quality.
- It is widely supported by players and mobile devices.
H.264 (Intel QuickSync): For MPEG-4 part 10, also known as H.264/AVC.
- Available on Intel processors with Intel HD Graphics.
- QuickSync is a hardware based H.264 encoder so is very fast, with significantly lower CPU usage than x264.
- Intel Haswell or newer CPU’s are recommended as these offer the best results in terms of Quality and Filesize.
- You can typically expect larger (but usually not significantly larger) file sizes and slightly lower quality to an equivilent x264 encode. This is a trade off that is fine for most.
H.265 (x265): Also known as HEVC
- This is the next generation of encoder that offers even higher quality encodes and better filesizes over H.264
- Note, encoding to H.265 is a significantly more complicated process, so it is expected to be slower than HandBrake’s H.264 encoders.
- Playback support is rather limited at the moment, particularly with mobile devices but this should improve drastically throughout 2015/16
MPEG-4 (ffmpeg): HandBrake offers FFmpeg’s MPEG-4 part 2 encoder for fast, low quality encoding.
- Better support from older devices such as DVD players and cheap “MP4 Players”
- Lower quality than the H.264 encode option but typically faster encodes.
MPEG-2 (ffmpeg): HandBrake offers FFmpeg’s MPEG-2 part 2 encoder for fast, low quality encoding.
- Fast Encoding, but requires larger files than MPEG-4 for the same quality level. Useful for testing but not much else.
VP8 (Libvpx):
- A free and open video codec which offers significant improvements over Theora.
VP3 (Theora): HandBrake can also encode Theora video. Theora video with Vorbis audio in the Matroska container represents a truly free option for multimedia encoding.
- However, Theora has yet to reach maturity when measured by quality at a given bitrate.