Signs of Life

It's been over one hundred days since the last public beta of HandBrake. Back then, I promised that "a second beta of 0.8.5 will follow this one, with a number of other exciting features." Well. It's been over 3 months. Where's the next release?

It's coming.

No, really!

A number of bugs have been solved. Some minor (like multiple audio tracks playing at once in QuickTime, or presets losing their "magic sauce" if you changed any settings)...some major (no more audio drops and no more audio choppiness or ballooning log files with discs from stand-alone DVD recorders).

But you know how once software goes "beta" there's supposed to be a feature-freeze? No one ever told us that =)

We've added more presets, including ones for the iPhone and PSP. We've made countless changes to the Mac GUI including adding Growl notifications and debug logging -- not to mention a swanky new unified toolbar. We've rewritten the Windows front-end in C#. We've got chapter naming. We've got support for files larger than 4 gigs. We've got faster iPod encoding and the latest optimizations for x264.

But wait, there's more!

Here's a list of acronyms and abbreviations that should make any nerd drool, and there's all coming soon, in the next release of HandBrake:

DTS,MKV,TS,MPG,VOB,IVTC,HQDN3D,YADIF,MCDEINT,PP7,SWS

Hmm...maybe we'll find a better name for this than "0.8.5b2"...

Be seeing you.