A new maintenance update to the major HandBrake 1.0 release of the open-source and cross-platform video transcoder application has been released recently for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

Coming a little over a month after the previous point release, HandBrake 1.0.3 is the third in the stable series, bringing a bunch of bug fixes to improve the video and audio performance, but also to address some platform-specific issues and implement a few enhancements that'll make HandBrake the best free video converter utility.

On the video front, the HandBrake 1.0.3 update addresses various issues and memory leaks for libav and OpenCL, improves sync for video streams that usually have a big delay, makes H.264 decoding work even in those cases where the initial GOP was dropped, and improves the 2-pass encoding, including for x265.

Thanks to this new update, the libav library should now be able to open WMV sources, as well as to seek in MKV files that contain embedded subtitles. On the audio front, HandBrake 1.0.3 improves mapping of single channel layouts and libav audio sync with MP4 files that contain edit lists.

A crash that occurred when attempting to encode AAC audio files at very high bitrates with the libav library was also fixed, along with a potential hang in libav during decoding of AAC files. Taking about AAC, HandBrake 1.0.3 makes the audio start point to use edit lists when encoding audio files using the CoreAudio AAC codec.

Platform-specific changes in HandBrake 1.0.3

As mentioned before, HandBrake 1.0.3 includes various platform-specific changes, such as a crash on macOS that occurred when attempting to edit a queued job, a crash on GNU/Linux platforms that could occur when attempting to select a video encoder, and improves certain controls to correctly apply values.

For Windows users, the update fixes "Title Specific Scan" for DVD and Blu-ray discs, repairs NLMeans denoise tunes or adds missing ones, and addresses two issues, one that could give an error when attempting to encode files using Intel QuickSync Video and another one where the SRT language code was incorrectly configured.

Download HandBrake 1.0.3 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows. The full changelog is attached below for more details.