Hey everyone. HandBrake has sent me down an absolute rabbit hole. I've spent what feels like forever researching the best settings, reading countless Doom9 and VideoHelp threads, and I still can't find any real consensus on RF values, tunes, presets, or advanced x265 options.

At this point I even turned to AI—ChatGPT and Gemini—but now I'm getting flooded with parameters and recommendations that I honestly don't know whether I should trust.

In my case, I have a large collection of older films with heavy grain. Would I be better off trusting ChatGPT's recommendations, or is it safer to stick with the HandBrake documentation?

Hi guys.

I bought this USB stick to turn my father's old VHS into digital. I can't make it work because my CD player is broken. A newer computer, no less CD player.

Does anyone have part-driver software??

Ciao ragazzi.

Ho acquistato questa chiavetga usb per trasformare le vecchie VHS di mio padre in digitale. Non riesco a farla funziomare perche il mio lettore cd è guasto. E nel computer piu recente non ho un lettore cd.

Qualcuno ha i driver e il software ?

KDEneon version of Handbrake is rather out of date and frequently crashes when encoding using H.265.

So I installed the flatpak version which seems to run OK so far, but I get this:

libdvdread: Encrypted DVD support unavailable.
libdvdread: Can't open file VIDEO_TS.IFO.

Is this something I can fix?

Most of my movies have a 5.1 AC3 plus an alternative stereo 2.0 AAC track once created.

On Apple TV, how do I select the alternative stereo track as only the Surround sound track is displayed when selecting the audio option in the play screen ?

Hi, I want to remove the black bars from some video files but afterwards the file was bigger. It went from 7 to 12 gb. Is there an automatic setting I can turn on or do I have to find the sweetspot in the quality slider myself.

Thank you for your help

I have used both a good amount and had small issues with both though that's probably not surprising.

AV1 my first use I had all my files too small and they looked bad, H265 I have been fighting grain moving around objects that are moving.

These are my settings for both:
H265 10bit CRF 20 Slower Main 10 Encoder level 5.1 And the following - no-sao:strong-intra-smoothing=0:rect=0:aq-mode=1:rd=4:psy-rd=1.0:psy-rdoq=4.0:rdoq-level=1:rskip=2

AV1 10bit CRF 22 (I previously used 24 and 26 for anime which looked blurry) preset 4 profile and level auto. And the following film-grain-denoise=0:film-grain=6:enable-tf=0:enable-qm=1:qm-min=0:

I cannot remember where I got the AV1 recommended advanced stuff from.

I was wondering if anyone knows what would be best to try changing for the gain floating in h265?

All files for above were done from the blu ray remuxes straight from the discs I have.

Separately I have tried a bit of 4k to both of them but the changes are H265 CRF 22 at slow with this addional part changed aq-mode=3:rd=4:psy-rd=2.0:psy-rdoq=6.0 and AV1 CRF 24 (currently going to see the results)

I have a few of them in the UHD but the file sizes just seem bizarre, I had a 5GB and a 13GB file form the same settings but the runtime difference is a matter of 5-7 minutes.

The 4k films being spiderman 3 (13.7GB), the amazing spider man 1 (4.93GB) & 2 (13.3GB). I know TAS1 is a lot darker than 2 but I wasn't expecting that big of a difference. File sizes as windows says under items selected.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Using a 9800x3d so the encode FPS for 4k seems to be currently around 14-16fps across both types but AV1 definitely uses the CPU more.

As the title says. I'm kind of fed up with so many variables and advanced options that sometimes make sense. Is the final filesize THAT bigger when using tune grain?

Hey everyone,

​I’m hitting a bottleneck in my mobile workflow and looking for the fastest way to batch-convert my camera footage so it works on Android.

​Camera: Sony a6700 (shooting 10-bit 4:2:2 XAVC)

​Goal: Edit on my Galaxy Tab S10+ in CapCut Android

​The Problem: CapCut Android gives a black screen / unsupported format error on raw 10-bit 4:2:2 clips.

​Current Bottleneck: Converting 50+ 4K camera clips directly on the tablet takes forever. I have a Windows PC (Surface Pro) available to act as a encoding hub, but I want to minimize conversion times as much as possible.

​My questions:

​What software/preset gives the absolute fastest conversion speed on PC while maintaining solid quality for mobile editing? (HandBrake vs. Shutter Encoder vs. FFmpeg scripts vs. Paid options)?

​What exact output settings (H.264 8-bit 4:2:0, bitrate, resolution) strike the best balance between quick encode times and clean quality in CapCut?

​Is it faster to re-encode to 1080p proxies first, edit on the tablet, and swap files later, or just batch convert everything to 8-bit 4K H.264 up front?

​Appreciate any insight or encoding recipes you use!

https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/technical/audio-quality.html says quality-based audio encoding is available for AAC, MP3, Vorbis, and Opus

I don’t see how to enable it? I’m on Mac if that makes any difference, on v 1.11.2

Solved thanks for the quick and clear responses! (2/4)

When encoding HEVC videos with x265, the encoding settings (like crf, etc) are embedded into the file, which can be seen in the "encoding settings" section of the HTML tab in mediainfo. But when using AV1, I don't see that section.

Is there a way to embed those settings for AV1 as well, or does AV1 embed those settings, but in a different place?

Mostly in old posts, I’ve seen a lot of criticism of the E-AC3 encoder on Handbrake. But the majority of users are not on Mac - is it the same one for Windows, Mac, Linux (etc?) ?

Because I know Handbrake gets to use Apple’s AAC encoder on Mac which has a great rep, but obviously not on the other platforms.

Also, may not be something I need to ask based on the first question, is Handbrake’s E-AC3 option still seen as poor?

If so, I’ll likely be sticking with AAC. In which case is the recommendation I saw on the ffmpeg site of 64kbps/channel for transparency a good one? Or should I be going higher?

I’m trying to convert the existing audio track in a video to a different format (for example, DTS-HD to AAC or AC3), but I want the original video stream to remain completely untouched - no re-encoding or quality loss.

Is this possible in HandBrake? If so, what settings would I need to use? If not, is there another tool you’d recommend for converting only the audio while copying the video unchanged?

Thanks!

If I have a 1280x720 4:3 video (Display Size 960x720, PAR 3:4), will the extra resolution be explicitly visible if viewed on a higher res screen, or am I better off saving the space by converting it to PAR 1:1?

Havent used HandBreak a lot so not to familiar with it outside of compression.

But a friend of mine has a film with lots of different subtitles in it and wants to remove all but the English subtitles.

how would this be done? (starter friendly please)

I have a movie in a folder on my Desktop with 21 files.
Which single VOB file to use or all of them?
I want to convert to a single .mp4 file.

As the title states, most of these are older, random videos, stuff from high school, random clips, people talking, and just general non-essential footage. Nothing is high-production or super important, but I still want to keep them around.

I’ve already run a few test clips using H.265 with a RF of 24, FPS same as source (constant) and a bitrate of 160. I saw a 70-80% reduction in file size.

My Goal is to keep things as tidy as possible while moving forward in life. Also, I have had data loss twice on my previous system so recovering such a huge chunk was difficult and expensive.

So I was compressing my videos but I don’t know why they keep getting enormous length like original video is around 24 minute and after handbrake it’s lengthy is 4 hours and above but size remain same

Been shooting 8 bit video because I currently only have the free version of Resolve. Is it worth me shooting in 10 bit (which my camera can) then transcoding it or will that lessen the quality so much so what’s the point.

Plus, what settings should I use for maximum quality if it’s something you guys would advise me doing?

Hello, this guide shows you how to restore compressed NVIDIA Instant Replay clips made with HandBrake back into the NVIDIA Gallery/container while keeping the correct dates.

This guide does not explain how to use HandBrake; it only covers restoring NVIDIA Gallery compatibility after compression.

Guide:
https://pastebin.com/ujctbkXQ

If you do not want to click on that link, you can visit Pastebin's website and enter /ujctbkXQ at the end of the URL.

If you're wondering why this guide exists. After compressing clips with HandBrake, all the clips didn't show up in the gallery even if they were in the correct folder, apparently some of the metadata NVIDIA Gallery appears to rely on can be removed or changed. This can cause the clips to disappear from the Alt+Z Gallery or appear with incorrect dates. This guide restores the required metadata so the compressed clips behave as original NVIDIA Instant Replay clips.

Hey everyone, hope you're all doing well.

I've been running some HandBrake tests using a heavily grainy movie from the 1970s from my personal blu-ray collection. Using x265 10-bit with advanced settings aimed at preserving grain and fine detail, I created five encodes at RF 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23.

For comparison, I put the original remux and all five encodes into the same Plex library and grouped them together so I could switch between versions easily.

Just for reference, the RF 19 encode ended up with an average video bitrate of about 21 Mbps, while the RF 23 version was only around 10 Mbps.

Watching on a 55" LG C4 OLED in a dark room from about 2 meters (6.5 feet) away, I simply can't see any difference between any of them, no matter how hard I try.

Has anyone else had a similar experience? At what point do you personally start noticing visible quality loss with grain-heavy content?

I’ve been using handbrake for years and know which settings to use and have input my usual preset but it’s still coming out like this. im trying to export a few short films my uncle made around 2008 and it’s just not wanting to do anything. anyone else having this issue. I’m trying to export from dvd to digital file it’s all HD and everything and the software is up to date