HandBrake was originally developed by Eric "titer" Petit in 2003 as software for the BeOS, before porting it to other systems. He continued to be the primary developer until April 2006, when the last official Subversion revision was committed. "titer" continued to be active on the HandBrake forum for a brief period after. Since May–June 2006, no one in the HandBrake community was successful in contacting "titer" and no further code changes were officially made.
MediaFork
In September 2006, Rodney Hester and Chris Long had been independently working to extract the H.264 video compression format from Apple'siPod firmware through reverse engineering before meeting on the HandBrake forum. Since their work was complementary, they began working together to develop an unstable, but still compilable, release of HandBrake supporting the H.264 format. Hester and Long made considerable progress in terms of stability, functionality, and look and feel. It was not possible to submit their patch to the HandBrake subversion repository without authorisation from "titer". Unable to submit their revisions as a successor to HandBrake, Hester created a subversion repository mirroring HandBrake's final subversion on the HandBrake website and began development on top of that. Hester and Long named the new project MediaFork.
From 2007
On 13 February 2007, Hester and Long were contacted by "titer" who informed them of his support and encouraged them to continue development. Plans were then made to reintegrate MediaFork as a direct successor to HandBrake. The MediaFork website and forums were moved to HandBrake's, and the next release was officially named HandBrake. There is another transcoder, called VidCoder, that uses HandBrake as its encoding engine. On 24 December 2016 after more than 13 years of development, HandBrake 1.0.0 was released.
Features
Hardware acceleration
Some GPUs or APUs contain SIP blocks dedicated to do calculations for video encoding. Such solutions are limited to the widely used codecs. When used, they are very fast but depending on the ASIC hardware generation, may or may not match the quality of good software encoders. HandBrake supports Intel Quick Sync since version 0.10.0. NVENC and VCE support was added in version 1.2.0 in December 2018.
HandBrake supports batch encoding through graphical user interface and command-line interface. Third-party scripts and UIs exist specifically for this purpose, such as HandBrake Batch Encoder, VideoScripts, and Batch HandBrake. All make use of the CLI to enable queueing of several files in a single directory.
Pass-through for AAC, AC-3, DTS, DTS-HD, E-AC-3, FLAC, MP3, and TrueHD
Reception
In 2011, Preston Gralla of PC World praised HandBrake for its feature set: "Advanced users will be pleased at the number of options." He furthermore criticized the usability for new users: "Note that HandBrake isn't necessarily the easiest program to use. It has a large number of options available, and there's no good explanation of what they do or how to use them. Beginners should stick with the defaults". He concluded by calling HandBrake a "solid choice" for people who are looking for a free video transcoder. In 2013, Lifehacker.com visitors voted HandBrake as the most popular video converter over four other candidates by a wide margin.
