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[post:544#5557]
Devil Doll  Reviews: 365 Posts: 1574 |
For years I have played anime on a standalone DVD player attached to my TV set. Consequently my conversion procedure for this purpose was creating a format that DVD players can handle: AVI containers with XviD video stream and MP3 audio stream.
I am skeptical about those all-in-one solutions though. Thus I set up high requirements: The software must
Now it's not like you open the video to be converted with Handbrake, and say "convert". Given the large number of output format variants for various Apple devices, and the various input formats (most notably in the subtitle section that supports hard-coding as well as importing subtitle scripts), much of the program's GUI looks intimidating at first. But walking through the many dialogs I soon got the impression that most of the defaults are reasonable, and there's little more to do than selecting audio and subtitle streams from the input and setting the checkbox "burned in" for the latter. Then a click on "Start", and off we go. Handbrake has a "preview" option where you can select a time interval of the video that will be encoded on the fly and then displayed via the VLC video player (whose installation location has to be configured in Handbrake once). That's how you can check whether the result looks and sounds as you expect it to before actually starting the whole conversion. This preview encoding is stored as file on the disk so that you can inspect it with MediaInfo - and unfortunately the latter is necessary (see below). Like VirtualDub, Handbrake has also a queue where you can schedule conversion tasks and then run the conversion of a whole bunch of files overnight or when you're away from the PC. One annoying issue of the GUI appears to be that it frequently forgets the setting "burned in" for the subtitles (such as when you edit the file name extension for the encoding result from the automatically selected value ".m4v" to "mp4"), then creating a proprietary "Apple Text" stream (without any attributes, i. e. of mediocre quality, and what's worse, not supported by my media player) instead of hard-coding the subtitles; I had a number of failed encodings because of this before I noticed this side effect. What's even worse is that the GUI sometimes even shows wrong information, such as the "burned in" checkbox being selected but not applied to the "added" subtitle stream shown below. This is really bothersome. I also don't like the "intelligent" logic that sets the file name extension to the "iPod friendly" value of ".m4v" every time it detects an AC3 audio stream (and can't be disabled via configuration), most notably in connection with the issue stated above. The logic for automatically selecting the correct audio and subtitle stream from several choices is configurable based on the languages of these streams; I have yet to make more experiences with this to judge its quality but tend to rather select streams manually than to waste another encoding pass. The video encoder is capable of making use of all four CPUs of my QuadCore CPU, thus processing 25 minutes of 1280x720px video stream in 15-20 minutes of real time; of course the processing priority of the encoder is configurable so that you won't paralyze your PC for this period. The video encoder settings offer a choice between a target file size, a target bit rate, and a target quantizer within the same dialog (the default being a quantizer of 20 which may be slightly higher quality and file size than what some fansubs are currently using), combining flexibility with usability. As for the "High 10" support, my test encodings worked okay; Handbrake being a black box, I don't know whether this is their achievement or whether they merely use the CCCP interface I have installed, but this doesn't really make a difference for me. But in the end, the subtitle issue (causing lots of unnecessary encodings that you detect being unusable only afterwards), unnerves me so much that I don't really want to rely on this software. Which is sad because it would be a very good solution otherwise. Hm, maybe I give it a test period of a couple of weeks and see whether I can deal with it. Edited on 01/22/2012 01:11 PM. |
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[post:544#5635]
Devil Doll Reviews: 365 Posts: 1574 |
Looks like the main reason for the confusing behavior were the myriads of predefined profiles in this program. One I deleted them all, and defined my own profile, the "unwanted intelligence" appears to have gone, and using the "queue" and even the "create batch file" feature makes converting a whole bunch of files quite convenient. |
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[post:544#5816]
Devil Doll Reviews: 365 Posts: 1574 |
In the meantime I have converted some 3600 files with Handbrake, using the "batch file" feature wherever possible. Almost every night I run a batch file processing one or more complete anime series from my archive, for both compressing them by about 30% compared to the AVI/XviD variant and making them definitely playable on my media player (which doesn't support some ancient formats like DivX3 and has issues with some fancy XviD features such as GMC3). Edited on 07/08/2012 10:04 PM. |
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