HandBrake 0.9.2: Released!

"I spent my refund on a digital TV with Surround Sound. It's got headphones, so I can watch Steven Seagal films without bothering Bonnie. Yes! Lock and load! Bring on the pain!"

HandBrake 0.9.2 incorporates many major and exciting changes—including full support for the AppleTV Take 2 and the latest iPhone/iPod Touch firmware. Mac users take note: this release is only compatible with Mac OS X Leopard, 10.5.

Download it now.

Apple fans will be delighted over:

• Dolby Digital 5.1 (AC3) sound in MP4 files, for a true DVD experience on the AppleTV and in Perian.
• Multi-track audio support for Apple devices
• iPhone-compatible anamorphic video at its full size

Power users will find:

• Variable frame rate encoding with detelecine filtering
• More flexible, "loose" anamorphic video
• MP4 optimization for progressive web downloads
• Dynamic range compression for encoding from AC3 audio
• Robust program and transport stream support

Speed freaks will squee at:

• A fresher, faster version of x264
• Tuning of FIFO sizes by processor count

And everyone should enjoy the increased stability brought by:

• Better handling of audio discontinuities
• Better handling of DVD read errors
• Work-arounds for missing end-of-cell markers
• Recovery when streams have signal loss
• Better synced chapter markers
• Better handling of B-Frames
• No more cutting off the very ends of films
• No more lost subtitles or chapter markers
• No more crashes in 2-pass encoding

As always, the complete list of changes is available on the Trac, as well as a complete timeline of 0.9.2's development.

HandBrake 0.9.1: Released!

"Mistakes? We don't make mistakes."

We're chagrined to announce the public release of HandBrake 0.9.1. Why chagrined? Because 0.9.0 wasn't as stable as it should have been, something 0.9.1 rectifies.

Download it now.

This minor update squashes a number of glaring bugs. Most notably, HandBrake will no longer hang at the end of encoding MKV files with chapter markers. This means the Animation, Bedlam, Constant Quality Rate, Deux Six Quatre, Film, and Television presets are now usable.

Additional improvements:

• Impressive performance enhancements
• Significant interface prettification (Mac more than Win)
• Color subtitles now show up in color
• Changing dimensions in Picture Settings no longer causes a crash (Mac)
• Forced subtitle support
• More robust exception handling (Win)
• Closing the main window no longer causes HandBrake to crash (Mac)
• Using "Slow" deinterlacing no longer doubles the chapter count.
• MPEG Stream support is now case-insensitive (.VOB as well as .vob, etc) and more compatible
• No more error messages sent to standard out instead of standard error
• Bigger buffer for the activity log (Mac)
• Proper display of fading subtitles
• On-completion options to shutdown, suspend, etc (Win)
• "Same as source FPS" now works correctly when the end-credits of a progressive film are interlaced.
• Add-to-queue fixed (Win)
• Target size fixed for the umpteenth time (Mac)

...and assorted other changes.

As always, for the complete list of changes, see the Trac.

Another day, another facelift

NOTE: A problem with the Trac RSS feed URL was identified and fixed shortly after this theme was applied.

Thanks to the tremendous work by an anonymous contributor, the HandBrake blog got a facelift for hlscript! The site is now leaner (with a 30% reduction in HTML), prettier, and better than ever!