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HandBrake 1.6 open-source, free, and cross-platform video transcoding application is now available for download as a major release that introduces support for the AV1 video codec and numerous other new features and improvements.
HandBrake 1.6 is here almost a year after HandBrake 1.5 and it finally adds the long-anticipated AV1 video encoding support through the implementation of SVT-AV1 (software) and Intel QSV AV1 (hardware) video encoders, along with 4K AV1 General, QSV (Hardware), and MKV (Matroska) presets.
New 4K HEVC General presets are also present in this new major HandBrake release, which also adds high bit depth and color depth support to various encoders and filters, as well as support for the Intel Deep Link Hyper Encode feature to leverage Intel integrated and discrete graphics to accelerate encoding.
Apart from AV1 video encoding, HandBrake 1.6 adds support for new video encoders and decoders, including VP9 10-bit encoder, NVENC HEVC 10-bit encoder, NVDEC decoder, as well as VCN HEVC 10-bit encoder. On top of that, the x264 encoder received H.264 levels 6, 6.1, and 6.2 profiles, and both the x264 and x265 encoders received H.264/H.265 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 profiles.
HandBrake 1.6 also adds a new Bwdif deinterlace filter and updates numerous filters, including Autocrop, Comb Detect, Decomb, Denoise, Detelecine, Grayscale, Denoise, Chroma Smooth, and Sharpen.
Under the hood, HandBrake now supports the --cpu configure parameter to enable support for native CPU architectures, as well as the –lto configure parameter to allow for link-time optimization. Many third-party libraries have been updated as well to their latest versions.
There’s also good news for Linux users as HandBrake’s interface is now on par with the Mac and Windows versions. Many bugs were fixed and various other quality-of-life improvements were added to make your video transcoding experience better. Check out the release notes on the project’s GitHub page for more details.
HandBrake 1.6 is available for download right now from the official website as a Flatpak app or a source tarball if you fancy compiling the software from sources.
To install the Flatpak bundle, download both the Flatpak app and the GPG key file from the downloads page and then run the first command below in the directory where you’ve downloaded them. Then, run the application with the second command below.
flatpak --installation=default install HandBrake-1.6.0-x86_64.flatpak
flatpak run fr.handbrake.ghb
Last updated 1 year ago
