HandBrake 0.9.9

It looks like the next version of HandBrake is nearing release.

For those not familiar, HandBrake is a wonderful video transcoder that supports many formats and lots of options for tweaking.

One of my favorite features from this new version (and one of the first you’re likely to notice) is the new interface for H.264 options. Rather than dealing with the Advanced panel, you can just specify the profile, level, and type of content to tune for.

For instance, if you need a video to work on a range of phones or tablets, you could specify Main profile, level 3.1 and tune for animation. Or maybe you’d tune for PSNR, or SSIM. And all this without having to deal with the Advanced options.

Still on my HandBrake wishlist:

• Support for VP8 (or even the upcoming VP9)
• More options for audio compression
• OGG support, for encoding videos that work in older versions of Firefox (though I’m not holding my breath for this one)
• Opus support would be wonderful, once someone can figure out how to cram it into a Matroska container (a guy can dream, can’t he?)