Introducing HandBrake 0.94

HandBrake is a free, cross-platform video encoder, that in my opinion has been the best available since Techspansion stopped making VisualHub. Today, the HandBrake development team released version 0.94, with over 100 new features.

The top five new features are:

x264 Optimisations - Improvements from the x264 project, which offer the holy grale of video encoding, "better picture quality, at a smaller size, faster."

64bit - A new Handbrake engine allows the development team to easily compile builds in 32bit and 64bit. Early reports say the 64bit version is approximately 10% faster the existing 32bit version.

Soft Subtitles - HandBrake can now include subtitle tracks that can be turned on and off, instead of always being locked on.

Live Preview - Live preview is an enhancement on the existing preview option, it enables you test your Handbrake settings before starting a full encode.

Constant Quality - HandBrake has migrated to quality-based encoding. This means that instead of telling encoders to use a specific size and vary quality to meet it, they tell the encoder to vary size to meet a given quality level. This change results in significant quality improvements.

They have also made some tweaks to the user interface, offering more practical presets:

 To try HandBrake out for yourself, head over to the development team's download page.