HandBrake Documentation

Audio Codecs

Encoding vs Passthrough

HandBrake supports two modes of operation for handling audio tracks from the source.

It can either:

• Re-Encode the track into a new format. For example, AC3 or DTS audio from a DVD or BluRay into AAC for playback on mobile devices.

• Passthru copies the audio track from the source to the newly encoded file.

Audio Encoders

• AAC:

  • Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is one of the most popular formats available in HandBrake and is widly supported by media players and mobile devices.

  • On Linux and Windows, HandBrake uses the FFmpeg AAC encoder.

  • On Mac, HandBrake uses Apple’s CoreAudio AAC encoder. It’s known to be much better quality and is the default option for Mac users.

• HE-AAC (Mac Only):

  • High Efficiency AAC encoder. This encoder is optimized for low-bitrate applications which may be useful for streaming.

  • Available on Mac only.

• MP3:

  • HandBrake also offers the MP3 audio codec, for which it uses the very well-regarded lame encoder.

• Vorbis:

  • HandBrake offers Vorbis audio encoding as well.

• Opus:

  • Opus is the successor to Vorbis. HandBrake uses libopus for encoding.

• AC3 and E-AC3:

  • HandBrake can encode to AC3 using FFmpeg.

  • This is not the same as Passthru. You can encode any audio track to AC3.

• Flac 16 and 24bit (FFmpeg):

  • Lossless audio compression.

  • It is not currently possible to passthru the compression level to the ffmpeg encoder which is currently defaulted to “5”

• ALAC 16 and 24bit:

  • Lossless audio compression.

Passthru options.

HandBrake supports passthru for a limited number of popular source formats. These are: AC3, E-AC3, DTS, DTS-HD, TrueHD, Opus, Vorbis, MP3, MP2, AAC, FLAC or ALAC (Passthru)

This copies the audio bit-for-bit from the source so offers no loss in audio quality. These audio tracks can be quite large so can impact the final size of the output file quite substantially.

Auto Passthru

In the audio encoders list, there is an option called “Auto Passthru”. When encoding, this will automatically passthru any supported format to the source file. If the source format is not supported, or not supported in the output container, the fallback encoder will be used. The default is AAC.