HandBrake with Live Video Previews

The HandBrake team has released version 0.9.3, which includes official, sanctioned builds of the GTK GUI in both 32- and 64-bit formats. This new version also brings a number of improvements that have been enjoyed by those of us using the SVN builds for some time to the rest of the HB users. However, new features are constantly being added, and the codec pool is always being updated, so I will continue to post the latest bleeding-edge builds here on my site, starting with svn1952, which includes live video previews (!), as well as a more recent version of the x264 and ffmpeg codecs.

Update (5/15/09): I have working binaries of the latest code available in my PPA repository. Directions for adding it to your package manager are available here.

Here's how the live preview looks. You can really get in there and see the direct impact of your changes. This leads to better cropping and a better sense for your end product. (this is my Mac x-forwarding GHB from my Ubuntu box. As you can see, the live previews even work through that):

For those of you who wish to compile on your own hardware (recommended for those with newer Core 2 Duo CPUs), the process is exactly the same as my previous SVN instructions, except for the addition of 2 new dependencies: libgstreamer0.10-dev and libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev. I've updated the instructions there to reflect the change.

HandBrake 0.9.2 and yasm 0.7.1 precompiled deb binary for 64-bit linux

Update (5/15/09): The binaries on this page are woefully out of date, but I have working binaries built from the latest code available in my PPA repository. Directions for adding it to your package manager are available here.

Download: HandBrakeCLI-AMD64 0.9.2 (Thanks Alexander!)
Download: yasm-AMD64 0.7.1
yasm-i386_0.7.1 (it's in a tarball, but the deb is inside)

I just got finished doing some building for HandBrakeCLI. They used to provide a precompiled 64-bit binary on the official site, but they've stopped for some unknown reason, so I decided to provide a copy of my own.

This binary doesn't need to be installed. Just navigate to the directory that contains it and type

./HandBrakeCLI

followed by any desired options (for more information on using the command line with HandBrake, visit the HandBrake wiki).

One of the biggest pains in compiling HandBrake (other than the lack of a comprehensive list of dependencies) is the fact that, to get the most out of HandBrake's processor-specific optimizations, you have to have the yasm assembler installed. Unfortunately, the version in Ubuntu's repos only supports instructions up to SSE2.

To correct this, I had to download and compile a newer version of yasm (namely 0.7.0) before I built HandBrake. Once I got that going, HandBrake recognized my cpu's extensions and accelerated the encoding speed to approximately 3.5-4x faster than the stock, non-yasm compile.

This binary should recognize any extensions present on my cpu: an AMD X-2 4000+ cpu, which has all the usual goodies up to SSE3 (so you fancy-pants core2duo users are out of luck on the SSSE3). Edit: A fella named Alexander was kind enough to supply a build with additional support for SSSE3 and Cache_64. Thanks Alexander!

My binaries include the original source code, which I have not modified. If you have any problems with them, please leave a comment or drop me an email and I'll see if I can correct the problem.