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HandBrake 1.4 has been released over the weekend as a “significant feature release” for this open-source and free video transcoder software for Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms.
HandBrake 1.4 comes about a month after the release of HandBrake 1.3.3 maintenance update in the 1.3 series of the open source software, and it’s here to introduce a major functionality, namely support for native 10-bit and 12-bit video encodes, including HDR10 metadata passthrough.
Of course, this means that you’ll now be able to open 10-bit or 12-bit encoded streams in HandBreak to convert them to another format of your choice. As most of these encodes are usually HDR, the built-in HDR10 metadata passthrough feature will come in handy as well, but the devs warn that not all filters will support 10-bit and 12-bit.
Also new in this release are three new filters, namely Chroma Smooth, Colourspace Selection, and support for QuickSync hardware accelerated Crop/Scale when using full path, MP2 audio passthrough support,
Apart from these major feature, the HandBrake 1.4 release also brings improvements to the hardware encoding functionality for various devices powered by AMD VCN (Video Core Next), Intel QuickSync Video, and Qualcomm ARM video encoding and decoding hardware.
Talking about Qualcomm ARM, this release also introduces support for Qualcomm ARM64 (AArch64/ARM 64-bit) devices running the Windows operating system, but only the command-line version of HandBreak works for now. In addition, version 1.4 is the first to support Apple Silicon M1 based Macs.
Among other improvements, there’s better handling of subtitles, including support for DVB subtitles (Passthru and Burn-In) and support for EIA608 closed captions, and it looks like there are various small UI and UX improvements for all supported platforms, such as padding support, limited upscaling support, and the ability to control the resolution limit. For more details, see the full release notes on GitHub.
HandBreak 1.4 supports FFmpeg 4.4 and can be downloaded right now from the official website as a Flatpak app that you can easily install on your GNU/Linux distribution using a graphical package manager like GNOME Software or Plasma Discover.
Last updated 3 years ago
