Handbrake 0.9.5 Released - New STH x264 benchmarks

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Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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Just as a FYI to folks since releases are few and far between that Handbrake 0.9.5 was released which is the application's first release in almost fourteen months.

I will probably be using this version going forward, despite the fact that it does not support Quick Sync. I will also start using 1080 sources instead of 720 as it makes a lot more sense to offload higher-end encoding.

The bad news is that 2011 CPU numbers will not be comparable to 2009-2010 numbers.
 

odditory

Moderator
Dec 23, 2010
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I like VidCoder better for windows use, since its based on handbrake but updated more frequently. Lightweight and optimized for Windows. http://vidcoder.codeplex.com/

I've followed the doom9, x264 and Handbrake scenes for years, have spent time in their IRC channels throwing requests at their devs, and it became quickly obvious that Handbrake is a Mac-oriented piece of software written by mostly Mac guys, with the windows client and GUI as an afterthought written by someone other than the core devs "when he gets around to it." Example, things like the "preview" window that the Mac version has had for years was still missing in the windows version last I checked.

The developer of VidCoder saw the handbrake shortcomings on the windows side and picked up the ball and ran. VidCoder uses Handbrake's SVN nightlies (based on x264 nightlies) + a great interface that gets updated frequently, generally multiple times per month. Written by a good guy that takes requests for features and often implements them quickly. Conversely, getting a feature request even considered by Handbrake's devs is like pulling teeth, they're stubborn as hell.

I spent a LOT of time A/B comparing VidCoder against Handbrake for DVD/BLURAY to x264 conversions, including long batch encoding queues, and found VidCoder superior in pretty much all aspects. Lately however I've backed off from transcoding Blurays and *especially* DVD's to x264 because harddisks are simply too cheap now to bother.
 
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cactus

Moderator
Jan 25, 2011
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I have been using RipBot264 for BluRays after I updated to Handbrake 9.5 and it kept crashing. Turned out to be CPU errors from my overclock and not software though. Good to know about VidCoder, I'll give it a try too.

I agree that HDD space is cheap, but I need a single file for streaming with Subsonic.
 

Metaluna

Member
Dec 30, 2010
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What settings are folks using for VidCoder? I tried encoding a few Blu-ray titles with all the default settings and I couldn't get any of my usual "go to" media players to work properly (VLC, Media Player Classic w/ Shark 007 codecs, Arcsoft TMT5, etc.). Mostly I would just get a black screen, though IIRC one title did show the very first frame of video correctly, but would not actually play. I believe I also tried playing around with different containers (mkv) and a few other things, but I was assuming that the defaults should be reasonably sane for a Win7 system.

Ideally I want to stream to an Xbox360 but VLC and MPC usually will play anything.