HandBrake 1.6.0, a major release that brings AV1 video encoding

Handbrake is one of the best (for me, it is the best) video transcoder (converter) tools out there. It is free, open-source, and natively supports Linux. In the past few days, the HandBrake team announced the release of HandBrake 1.6.0 with numerous new features and improvements.

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New & improved encoders and filters

If we liken applications to cells, then the DNA in such apps is the encoders and filters. The new version comes with new and improved genes that include:

• AV1 video codec: Handbrake now supports AV1 video encoding via SVT-AV1 software encoder and Intel QSV hardware encoder;
• VP9, NVENC HEVC, and VCN HEVC 10-bit encoders;
• H.264 (also referred to as MPEG-4) levels 6, 6.1, and 6.2;
• H.264/H.265 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 profiles;
• Bwdif deinterlace filter;
• Improved Autocrop, Comb Detect, Decomb, Denoise, Detelecine, Grayscale, Denoise, Chroma Smooth, and Sharpen filters.

New presets & configuration parameters

In addition to the new encoders and filters, HandBrake 1.6.0 features new and revised presets to make your video encoding life easy-breezy:

• 4K AV1 General, QSV (Hardware), and MKV (Matroska) presets;
• 4K HEVC General presets;
• Revised and renamed Web presets: in this version, Web presets are renamed to Creator, Email, and Social.

Furthermore, the HandBrake team added two new configuration parameters to improve package building and compiling: the --cpu configure parameter and the --lto configure parameter.

Miscellaneous improvements

On top of all this, this major HandBrake release adds high bit depth and color depth support to various encoders and filters. It fixes numerous bugs, removes deprecated presets, and updates third-party libraries.
Last but not least, this release improves interface parity with Windows and Mac versions.

Get HandBrake 1.6.0

Finally, you can download HandBrake 1.6.0 from the official website as a Flatpak package.

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Also, you can install it using the Flathub repository. This version is already available on rolling release Linux distributions such as Arch.

📣Which app do you personally use to convert videos?

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