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
• Clear
• Debian
• Fedora
• Gentoo
• Ubuntu
• Void

HandBrake’s optional experimental support for Intel Quick Sync Video on Linux requires installing the Intel Media SDK and its dependencies. See the Intel Media SDK Releases page and Intel Media SDK Build Instructions.

Building HandBrake

Clone the HandBrake repository.

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

List available tags in the HandBrake 1.5.x release series, and check out the most recent.

git tag --list | grep ^1\.5\.
git checkout refs/tags/$(git tag -l | grep -E '^1\.5\.[0-9]+$' | tail -n 1)

Build HandBrake. To enable experimental support for Intel Quick Sync Video, 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

If you wish to then uninstall

sudo make --directory=build uninstall

To start over, simply remove the build directory.

rm -rf build