HandBrake Documentation

Building HandBrake for Linux

If you have installed a HandBrake package from your distribution or other third-party package repository, please remove it before proceeding. See the section, Warning about broken third-party builds on Where to get HandBrake for more information.

Installing dependencies

Dependency installation instructions are available for the following distributions.

• Arch
• CentOS
• Debian
• Fedora
• Gentoo
• Ubuntu

HandBrake’s experimental support for Intel Quick Sync Video on Linux requires the Intel Media SDK.

Building HandBrake

Clone the HandBrake repository.

git clone https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake.git && cd HandBrake

List available tags in the HandBrake 1.2.x release series, and check out the most recent.

git tag --list | grep ^1\.2\.
git checkout refs/tags/$(git tag -l | grep -E '^1\.2\.[0-9]+$' | tail -n 1)

Build HandBrake. To enable experimental support for Intel QSV via the Intel Media SDK, append --enable-qsv. To build the command line interface only, disable the graphical interface by appending --disable-gtk.

./configure --launch-jobs=$(nproc) --launch

When complete, you will find HandBrakeCLI in the build directory. If the graphical interface is enabled, you will also find ghb in the build/gtk/src directory.

Install HandBrake (optional). When installing the graphical interface, icon and desktop files for the Applications menu will be also installed.

sudo make --directory=build install

To start over, simply remove the build directory.

rm -rf build