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r/handbrake

▲ 24 r/handbrake

Most people can't tell the difference between a music track with 192 kbps MP3 and FLAC. Why do people emphasize having an audio track with an extremely high bit rate for movies?

Doing a double blind test, most people can't tell the difference between 192 kbps MP3 audio and uncompressed FLAC.

A 320 kbps MP3 is virtually indistinguishable from the original.

So what I'm wondering is, as long as the audio track has 5.1 or 7.1 channels, why is it so important that the bit rate is high?

Sometimes the audio for a movie is multiple gigabytes, can people really tell the difference? And if the answer is yes, why can't they tell the difference with normal music MP3s?

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u/Willing_and_Fable — 11 hours ago
▲ 1 r/handbrake

What to set up so final video won't be larger than original?

Greetings.I usually burn subtitles on my videos & same time i compress them a bit.But i noticed that many times the opposite happens.Final converted video is 1x,2x or 3x times larger instread from original video.Is there any setting here on how to resolve this?

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u/kos25k — 12 hours ago
▲ 3 r/handbrake

Same presets, same version, different results when running from the CLI

I am trying to compress my personal videos using HandBrake. I've chosen the H.265 NVENC 1080p, only modified the quality factor and switched to the slowest preset.

The next step was to batch run this for all my videos inside nested folders. The GUI does not support this, and it seems like there are no plans to include this feature, so I've made a Bash script that does this for me. The core instruction is the following:

HandBrakeCLI --preset-import-gui -Z "H.265 NVENC 1080p (mine)" -i "$file" -o "./hb/$file"

This works well and the file is compressed,but to a lesser extent than the same settings on the GUI. A video from WhatsApp went from 8,1 MiB to 4,8 MiB (CLI) and 4,2 MiB (GUI), a 14% difference. This means a few extra GiB extra in my entire directory. It's not a huge deal, but it's a very odd behavior not mentioned anywhere on the open web.

The log seems identical to the one on the GUI. Both are running the latest version available on the Fedora 44 repositories, which I recognize are very old.

I've recompiled the latest version locally, the results are the exact same.

GUI:

Runtime environment: Native
Commit hash:  e9ff2bdf1
Build date:  2024-06-21 00:00:00
GTK version:  4.22.4 (built against 4.22.4)
GLib version:  2.88.2 (built against 2.88.1)
Built with support for: 
- Intel QuickSync
- Nvidia NVEnc
- fdk-aac
- x265

CLI:

HandBrake 20240621000000-e9ff2bd-unknown
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u/Due-Detail442 — 14 hours ago
▲ 6 r/handbrake

Can I encode video from one camera to match the dimensions and quality of another?

I have an old digital camera which I have forgotten to bring out to film some short videos, but would like to keep the continuity of looking like it is from the same camera while filming from my phone.

Is this attainable?

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u/ShonkyStonky — 21 hours ago
▲ 14 r/handbrake

AV1 to X265 or X264

Lets assume you have videos in AV1 at a low bitrate. If you want to convert the video to either X265 or X264, should you INCREASE the bitrate in order not to lose image quality? Obviously doing this while keeping the quality preset to Slow. Chosing 10bit X265 or 12bit X264 would defeat the purpose because the reason for doing this conversion would be to play the videos in older devices (x265) and legacy devices such as a very old tablet (X264). Thank you all in advance!

PS I don't like throwing away old hardware. I keep old hardware offline and use them as media playing devices to take to the beach. I would not risk taking a new and expensive tablet to the beach (it can get stolen or damaged).

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u/IonH3Oplus — 1 day ago
▲ 16 r/handbrake

Stutter after encoding Anime

I experience some noticable stutter after encoding with handbrake. On the left is the original mkv from the blu ray disk and on the right a encoded version. The Anime is Cowboy Bebop. I have used many different settings without solving the problem. I'm relatively new to the topic. My GPU is a RTX 4070. Here's what I have tried so far:

  • switching between H.265 10-bit software encoding and hardware encoding (NVEnc)
  • enable/disable animation tuning
  • Switch between contsnt framerate (same as source) and variable framerate
  • Tried advanced options from the top comment of this 7 year old reddit post

Am I too picky with the stuttering as it's only noticable in slow situations or am I doing something wrong? All your help is much appreciated!

Edit: The stuttering seems a bit hard to notice in the video, probably because the quality loss from the upload

Edit 2: Here's one of the the logs: http://omebox.com/s/xRWtUWhqS8lAemHU

u/CoRe534 — 2 days ago
▲ 2 r/handbrake

Encoding a video rendered with Kdenlive turns into grey mush

I encoded a tv recording and then cut it with KDenlive and rendered it. The resulting file is about 9GB so I encoded it again with Handbrake(Fast 1080p30) and the resulting video turns out to be grey mush. I have tried changing some settings and running the preview, but the result does not change.

u/Nexusnui — 4 days ago
▲ 6 r/handbrake

New to HandBrake - Does This Encode Size Sound Right?

Hey guys, I just started using HandBrake, so I'm still figuring things out. I encoded a pretty grainy 1970s movie from a 1080p Blu-ray using the x265 10-bit preset (from the Matroska section), tune=grain, and CRF 22. The output file ends up being around 9 GB. Does that sound about right, or am I doing something wrong?

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u/Schwarzellone — 6 days ago
▲ 3 r/handbrake

when just opening handbrake pretty much locks my pc

its like when you overload your pc windows 11 slows down really to a crawl able to reboot sometimes it does it again but its not all the time

specs r7 3700x 32 gb ram 2080ti fully updated windows 11

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u/emily1974 — 7 days ago
▲ 6 r/handbrake

Does this file size output make sense?

I am currently transcoding my movie library to AV1 and from my understanding these settings should give me the best fidelity.

What I want to keep from these transcodes is:

The highest possible audio quality.

The best possible HDR (hopefully Dolby vision but is dependent on movie ofc)

Subtitles (English and Portuguese) with no burn in

It would also be nice if the transcoding didn't take too much time

I was hoping someone could tell me if these settings make sense and or if I should change them.

I hope this screenshot is enough and sorry if it's pixelated the monitor I'm using right now doesn't have a very high resolution.

Thank you

u/ZestyclosePrize7676 — 8 days ago
▲ 3 r/handbrake

I currently use these custom args (265) - Any issues I should be aware of?

There were various reasons why I ended up on this set of args, between trying to keep image quality to an acceptable level while also keeping processing times to something I could find reasonable. This is where I ended up.

And I don't personally notice any issues, but of course there's always going to be something that I'm not necessarily looking for, or didn't happen to show up in the media I was watching.

I run this on the 'slow' preset, but it makes little difference if I change it as I already have several of the 'very slow' features activated anyway in this. The few I'm missing seemed to have negligable quality effects but made the processing times significantly longer.

>strong-intra-smoothing=0:early-skip=1:rskip=2:rskip-edge-threshold=3:ref=5:rc-lookahead=72:rect=0:limit-modes=1:aq-mode=3:aq-strength=0.8:selective-sao=2:tu-inter-depth=4:tu-intra-depth=4:limit-tu=1:rd=4:rdoq=2:psy-rd=0.9:psy-rdoq=3.5:subme=4

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u/LFAdvice7984 — 7 days ago
▲ 8 r/handbrake

Nvidia or AMD Encoding X265

Is Nvidia cards still better at giving better quality HEVC encodes then AMD cards? Or is AMD now similar to Nvidia? I currently just use my Intel encoders.

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u/xenomorph-85 — 13 days ago
▲ 12 r/handbrake

Musings on VMAF results and actual encode settings

For various reasons I've been attempting to determine a new workflow for dealing with media files and optimising storage requirements vs quality.

I've been comparing different settings and software - Fastflix for it's built in easy handling of HDR10+ & Dolby versus Handbrake. I'm far more interested in NVENC than CPU as the reasons I can't just pop out and buy a couple hundred TB of storage are the same reasons I can't just pop out and buy a TR 9995WX.

Anyway, as far as I know, both Handbrake and FastFlix are based on FFMPEG. Which in theory means that with the same settings, the outputs should be the same. However, analysis with FFMetrics v1.7 suggests something very different - Handbreak scores notably higher on VMAF for basically every bitrate, but also loses dramatically on PSNR, SSIM & XPSNR.

This has me thinking that HB is doing something under the hood that FF does not. I've been searching around to see if HB will tell me the FFMPEG command line it's doing without success. The resultant log file is pretty substantial, but I believe the relevant section from the encode log is this:

"Video": {
    "Encoder": "nvenc_h265_10bit",
    "Level": "auto",
    "Bitrate": 6000,
    "MultiPass": false,
    "Turbo": false,
    "ColorRange": 2,
    "ColorMatrixCode": 0,
    "Options": "",
    "Preset": "slower",
    "Profile": "auto",
    "HardwareDecode": 4
  }

Compare to the FF command line here:

NVEncC64.exe --avsw --device 0 -i TEST.1080p.SOURCE.mkv --video-metadata clear --metadata clear --chapter-copy -c hevc --vbr 6000 --bref-mode each --preset quality --tier high --lookahead 32 --no-aq --level auto --chromaloc auto --colorrange auto --colormatrix bt2020nc --transfer smpte2084 --colorprim bt2020 --master-display G(8500,39850)B(6550,2300)R(35400,14600)WP(15635,16450)L(10000000,1) --max-cll 0,0 --dhdr10-info copy --dolby-vision-rpu copy --dolby-vision-profile copy --output-depth 10 --multipass 2pass-full --mv-precision Auto --avsync cfr --audio-copy 1 --audio-metadata 1?language=eng --audio-disposition 1?default --tune uhq -o TEST.1080p.SOURCE-FFLIX_6000kbit.mkv

I'm hoping someone can offer me insights as to what I'm missing. AFIK, "slower" preset (HB) is equivalent to -P6 and "quality" preset (FF) is -P7. I've been using NVEncC over NVEnc in fastflix as it's been delivering better VMAF scores.

u/egosumumbravir — 11 days ago
▲ 7 r/handbrake

Bitrate for equivalent to quality between H265 10-bit Fast and Slow

I’ve been doing all my stuff in H265 10-bit Fast and usually happy with the results.

Anyway I’ve suddenly gained more patience (sleeping 8hrs instead of 6) and did a couple of the more challenging movies with Slow at the weekend and was happy with the results.

I’m not running another encode until the Euro heatwave subsides, or else I’d just test myself further.

If I was previously content for all but the most action-packed movies at Fast 6000kbps, what would equivalent be on Slow? 5500? 5000?

(I’m primarily working with grainy stuff so usually have tune=grain, if that helps)

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u/Wonderful_Emu_9610 — 11 days ago
▲ 16 r/handbrake

Handbrake nukes Dolby Vision metadata after the update

Hi,
I've been re-encoding my 4K HDR remuxes for quite some time. Everything worked perfectly with HandBrake 1.10.2 (2025090600), which correctly converted Dolby Vision metadata to Profile 8.1 during encoding. However, after updating to HandBrake 1.11.2 (2026060700), Dolby Vision metadata is no longer preserved. The resulting files contain only HDR10, with all DoVi metadata stripped out.
As a workaround, I now have to use DDVT to reinject the Dolby Vision metadata into the HandBrake output, which adds extra steps and processing time.
Has anyone else experienced this issue with HandBrake 1.11.2? Is there a setting I'm missing, or was Dolby Vision preservation changed in this version?
Thanks in advance for any help.

HandBrake 1.10.2 (2025090600)

https://preview.redd.it/21ttlien929h1.png?width=810&format=png&auto=webp&s=65e7be90588640abbc71aa817c15de4d542de6e1

HandBrake 1.11.2 (2026060700)

https://preview.redd.it/ai51zkle929h1.png?width=817&format=png&auto=webp&s=51362388a3a335e7bcd04c45329be914256532c2

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u/kulind — 13 days ago