The developers of HandBrake, the popular open source video transcoder, have announced the release of version 0.9.9 of the popular video conversion application. Another two beta releases of HandBrake, one which previews the transcoder working with Intel's Quick Sync Video SDK and another which uses OpenCL to accelerate cropping and scaling and decoding on windows, were also released.

The main HandBrake release includes a number of enhancements, beyond a better pineapple icon. Blu-ray subtitle support now works with foreign audio search, can be burned into video, and can be passed through to MKV files. Additional video framerates have been added for 30, 50, 59.94 and 60fps, and a double framerate mode for deinterlace/decomb is now supported. There is also improved audio remixing with more mixdown targets, upmixing to 5.1 and the ability to discard a channel, the ability to select higher or lower audio rates where appropriate, audio dithering for 16-bit FLAC, and the use of libavcodec for DTS audio decoding.

All GUI implementations now have support for x264's range of presets, tuning and profile options as an alternative to the, still available, Advanced panel. They also come with a HandBrake specific option to make sure that settings comply with specific H.264 levels. The change also sees the older legacy presets being removed.



HandBrake's improved preview and new x264 controls make transcoding content even easier.

On Linux, HandBrake has received various bug fixes and has been switched to use more system libraries (fontconfig, freetype, libxml2, libass, libogg, libvorbis, libtheora and libsamplerate) rather than bundling them. HandBrake on Windows has had its UI rewritten in WPF and switched to a smaller .NET 4 Client profile to make it a smaller download.

The Mac OS X version now has better support for Retina displays and can stop a Mountain Lion system from sleeping while encoding and scanning. Progress is now more attractively displayed in the dock and the preview viewer has been improved. Finally, an update to Growl 2.0.1 means that when the Growl notification framework is not installed, the system's own Notification Center will display alerts.

The new version of HandBrake is available to download as binaries for Windows and Mac OS X or as source code, with an Ubuntu PPA for Raring, Quantal and Precise Ubuntu users.

(djwm)