Does Handbrake provide a free lunch? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Peabody
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 10, 2019, 02:35:39 am
content: I'm making a video, and am using the Shotcut editor. It exports in libx264 MP4 with "Quality-based VBR", which seems to me to be the same as what Handbrake does. But there's a lot of commentary out there that refers to Handbrake in almost mystical terms, saying it magically reduces file size without any reduction in quality. Is that true? Or, if Shotcut can produce a Quality-based VBR video, is there anything to be gained by doing a second render in Handbrake?

author: sokoloff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 10, 2019, 03:16:43 am
content: Handbrake is not magic.If you compress the file with HB enough, there are readily visible artifacts and loss of quality.

author: edy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 10, 2019, 03:30:35 am
content: I use Kdenlive for my editor on Linux. As far as I know, it uses whatever codec libraries are on the system such as ffmpeg. I wouldn't expect Handbrake to be magical. It depends on the settings and how configurable you make things, and how many passes. If you have the ability to customize all of these settings in your software, you would be able to achieve similar results. I find that with proper settings you can get a lot out of ffmpeg, but with wrong settings you can end up with garbage...For example, I've tried to convert some huge .TS files from a BlueRay to x265 and even x264 using ffmpeg but got some strange artefacts (like interlacing not at the beginning but end of the video) which made no sense as the original source had none. You can see on freezing the motion frames the interlaced lines, but only certain parts of the video and not others seem to be affected.Also I noticed certain versions of Handbrake work better than others. When I was using Windows I had Handbrake up to a certain version and kept it, because I noticed later versions didn't encode certain things properly or crashed.

author: Whales
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 10, 2019, 04:57:31 am
content: Handbrake itself does not do encoding, but it does provide a pretty GUI. Behind the scenes it's using external encoders (the same as other programs would hopefully use).I assumed that handbrake used ffmpeg behind the scenes but I think I might be wrong.Handbrake might have a leg up on the default settings it suggests you use for encoding, but apart from that it won't be doing any magic. All of the magic and developent is done on the codec projects themselves (libx264, etc); not the frontends like handbrake.

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 10, 2019, 08:47:59 am
content: Handbrake offers access to a large number of settings and probably very few people ever figure out how to use them all, or even try to, and just use the built in presets.Handbrake can use both ffmpeg or h.264. I have version 0.9.8 and h.264 is the default. I noticed a few odd things with version 1.0.5 and despised the monochrome flat icons, so I stayed with the 0.9.8 version. One of these days I may look at a newer version.

author: Whales
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 10, 2019, 10:17:33 am
content: Quote from: rdl on January 10, 2019, 08:47:59 am*sigh*When will people realise that colourful icons are actuallyreally usefulwhen using software. If you make all of the icons look the same you might as well not have any.I think Libreoffice likes to hide many of its icons by default now, and Gnome went (still does?) through a stage of disabling them by default. The GIMP has now changed to a monochrome style by default, making it much harder to navigate the (recently rearranged) menus.There's a reason I don't use a black and white monitor.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 10, 2019, 02:53:27 pm
content: I don't think you have to have color to make a good icon. The problems arise from icons that were designed in color and then flattened to monochrome, and/or icons that were designed large and then shrunk down. The icon design process has to start from the lowest detail version (for example, 16px monochrome), and then have detail progressivelyaddedfor larger and more colorful versions. This forces the low-detail versions to be, well, iconic.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 10, 2019, 03:08:21 pm
content: Quote from: Peabody on January 10, 2019, 02:35:39 amIf your editor uses libx264, then its quality will be the same as with handbrake using the same encoder. (Assuming they both are using the same version of the encoder library, etc.) Handbrake is little more than a very good graphical front-end to various encoders.Quote from: Whales on January 10, 2019, 04:57:31 amQuote from: rdl on January 10, 2019, 08:47:59 amFYI, on more recent systems, handbrake can also use the hardware encoders present in newer hardware. So this can be Intel Quick Sync (shows up as QSV in HB on Windows), or on Mac it's either Intel Quick Sync or the hardware encoder in the T2 chip (both under the "videotoolbox" API in macOS, selected in HB via ffmpeg arguments, I believe). For h.265 encoding (which is extremely compute-intensive on a CPU), this saves a ton of time.

author: Peabody
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 10, 2019, 11:19:14 pm
content: My Shotcut editor also provides the option to use hardware acceleration. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with Shotcut.So my video is 1080P, 30 fps, and mostly consists of a sequence of pictures - 1920x1080 bmp files - with voiceover. There's not much need for a high bitrate. The Shotcut preset for Youtube has a Quality-based VBR of 59%, whatever that means, and I did a version that way, but also one at 50%. The filesizes for the 13:33 video are 705 MB versus 322 MB, and looking at the videos I can't tell the difference. But perhaps there is a reason for submitting the larger file on the theory that the smaller versions Youtube creates - 720P, 480P. etc. - will look better if downsized from the higher quality original. Just guessing.