Open source video converter HandBrake 1.10 has been released, adding new sharing presets (for Discord’s stingy upload limits), metadata improvements and more.
In the seven months since the HandBrake 1.9 release delivered, among other changes, lossless VP9 encoding, the team building this free media converter for Windows, macOS, and Linux have added a clutch of new capabilities.
HandBrake 1.10 now includes “Social 10MB” presets to help those on Discord, which reduced the max size of uploads by free accounts to 10MB last year. These presets may be useful for e-mailing video to people, or sharing short clips where visual fidelity isn’t a priority.
The new presets are essentially the Social 25MB versions “one resolution tier down” with a more restricted bitrate and slower encoder preset, as the developers put it.
It’s can be used to convert clips of up to 30 seconds, 1 minute, and 2 minutes, but there’s no 5-minute version because the quality would be rather poor (150 kbps at 180p resolution).
“The slow x264 encoder preset helps squeeze a bit more quality out of these lower bit rates, making a small but noticeable improvement in edge artifacts, especially for complex objects surroundeed by flat areas, e.g., a plane in the sky.” (sic)
If you’ve converted media only to be annoyed that some metadata wasn’t included in the output file, HandBrake 1.10 resolves that with better metadata passthru. Creation data, location and, more importantly, cover art are now preserved.
“Before updating, please make sure there are no pending encodes in the Queue. Please also make note of any custom presets you have created, as they may not be compatible with newer versions,” the team says in their release announcement.
- Option to choose the encoder colour range has been added
- Dolby Vision and HDR10+ passthru can be disabled in CLI
- Improved Framerate Shaper metrics performance for high resolution frames
- VCN encoders preset now gets properly set
- NVEnc CQ range increased 63
- Audio track names can be disabled for passthru and auto-naming
- EAC3 + Atmos is properly signaled in MP4
- Option to disable subtitle track name passthru
- SubRip/UTF-8 subtitles passed to MKV without conversion to SSA
- Burning bitmap subtitles less likely to cause a crash
- Fixed an excessive memory usage during the in-depth scan
- Improved performance on Windows on ARM
Linux users get some additional fixes, including resolution for an annoying queue removal crash, proper Opus and Vorbis passthru validation in WebM, and presets for unavailable hardware encoders being hidden by default.
More details on this release can be found by checking out the official release notes available on HandBrake GitHub releases page.
Install HandBrake 1.10.0 on Ubuntu
HandBrake is free, open-source software available for Linux, macOS and Windows, with download links on the official website.
On Ubuntu, easiest way to install HandBrake is to get it from Flathub where it’s an official, verified package, although new releases typically take a couple of days to be added (so at the time I publish this the Flathub build is on v1.9.2).
If you search for HandBrake in Ubuntu’s App Center it will suggest an out-of-date, unofficial snap that has not been updated since 2019 (in the stable channel). I’d recommend you don’t use that if you want the best performance and the latest features.
Unofficial Handbrake PPAs are available so if you’re absolutely certain you want a DEB build, those are an option.
Whichever way you get it, you may want to learn how to use it. Helpfully, the HandBrake Docs is already up-to-date to walk you though both the latest features and all of the existing ones.