New (old?) look

For about a year now, the HandBrake blog/front page/RSS feed have been provided via WordPress, an open-source blog tool that provides amazing ease-of-use and fresh appearance at the expense of very high RAM and CPU requirements on busy sites.

As a result of this, many of you have noticed that especially during release periods, the site gets painfully slow (and occasionally goes down altogether).

In an attempt to combat this, we have redesigned the news portion of the site using an infrastructure called hlscript that provides much of the same functionality with far less resource requirements.

We hope that you like the new look - it is something of a blend of the "classic" HandBrake blog look (from over a year ago) and the WordPress K2 theme that was graciously provided to us by Hawkman.

The most critical elements of the old site - the Downloads page, the Documentation page, and the RSS feeds - have had redirects set up so that the old links should still work on the new site. If you discover anything broken or any often-used links that still need to be redirected, please let us know on the General discussion forum.

Thank you for your continued support and interest in HandBrake!

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.

HandBrake 0.8.5b1 Released

"I don't want to go on the cart! I feel fine. I... feel... happy!"

After a 14-month hiatus, a brand new development team, a project forked then unforked, and literally hundreds of revisions...

We are pleased to announce the release of HandBrake 0.8.5b1!

This new version of HandBrake encompasses everything that was in MediaFork 0.8.0b1 and much, much, much more.

Download HandBrake 0.8.5b1

• For Mac OS X (Graphical, 10.4 or newer)
• For Linux (Command-line)
• For Windows (Command-line)
• For Windows (Graphical)
• For Mac OS X (Command-line, 10.3.9 or newer)
• Source code

The complete change set is available and well worth a read (PDF), but here's a summary for the impatient:

• User presets (Mac)
• AppleTV and PS3 support
• Anamorphic, even in QuickTime
• Surround sound (both AAC 5.1 and Dolby Pro Logic II)
• Chapter markers (QuickTime-style)
• Official support for the Windows GUI
• PPC Linux support
• High profile H.264

A number of bugs have been fixed as well, including the restoration of multiple audio tracks. Still, keep in mind that this is a beta, and no particular level of stability or usability is guaranteed; don't delete your copy of HandBrake 0.7.1 just yet.

Following the release of MediaFork 0.8.0b1, we were overwhelmed by new users. Fortunately, with them came new coders! A year ago, there were 2 developers. Now, there are over a dozen. Thanks to this happy development, HandBrake's future is full and bright. So stay tuned: a second beta of 0.8.5 will follow this one, with a number of other exciting features.