HandBrake 1.6 Adds AV1 Video Encoding, Quick Look Support, More

The popular HandBrake open-source video transcoder for Linux, Mac, and Windows has been updated to version 1.6.

HandBrake 1.6 brings numerous new features and improvements including support for AV1 video encoding, VP9 10-bit encoding, improved video scaling performance on Apple Silicon, Quick Look support, and much more.

Check out the full changelog below.


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HANDBRAKE 1.6.0

All platforms
General
● Added AV1 video encoding
● Added high bit depth and color depth support to various encoders and filters
● Added 4K AV1 General, QSV (Hardware), and MKV (Matroska) presets
● Added 4K HEVC General presets and updated related presets to use similar encoder settings
● Revised Web presets and renamed to Creator, Email, and Social
● Removed VP8 presets
○ The VP8 video encoder is now deprecated and will be removed in a future release
○ Related, the Theora encoder is long deprecated and will be removed in a future release
● Miscellaneous other preset revisions


Video
● Added SVT-AV1 (software) and Intel QSV AV1 (hardware) video encoders
● Added VP9 10-bit encoder
● Added NVENC HEVC 10-bit encoder
● Added support for the NVDEC decoder.
● Added VCN HEVC 10-bit encoder
● Added H.264 levels 6, 6.1, and 6.2 for the x264 encoder
● Added H.264/H.265 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 profiles for the x264 and x265 encoders
● Added H.265 4:2:2 profile for VideoToolbox encoder on Apple Silicon
● Added support for Intel Deep Link Hyper Encode (leverage multiple QSV media engines to increase performance)
● Fixed longstanding issue where slowest NVENC encoder preset caused encoding failures
● Removed support for Intel CPUs older than 6th generation (Skylake) when using Intel Quick Sync Video

Filters
● Added Bwdif deinterlace filter
● Improved Autocrop filter algorithm
○ Higher accuracy on mixed aspect ratio content, e.g. both letterbox and full frame pictures
● Improved video scaling performance on Apple Silicon and ARM-based systems
○ Use zscale (zimg) by default, falling back to swscale where necessary
● Improved multithread performance (slightly) for the following filters on high core count systems
○ Comb Detect
○ Decomb
○ Denoise
-- NLMeans
● Updated the following filters to support higher than 8-bit content and 4:2:2/4:4:4 chroma subsampling
○ Detelecine
○ Comb Detect
○ Decomb
○ Grayscale
○ Denoise
-- NLMeans
-- HQDN3D
○ Chroma Smooth
○ Sharpen
-- UnSharp
-- LapSharp

Build system
● Added support for building for OpenBSD
● Added --cpu configure parameter to enable building for native CPU architecture
● Added --lto configure parameter to enable link time optimization
● Miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements

Third-party libraries
● Updated libraries
○ AMF 1.4.24 (AMD VCN encoding)
○ FFmpeg 5.1.2 (decoding and filters)
○ FreeType 2.12.1 (subtitles)
○ Fribidi 1.0.12 (subtitles)
○ HarfBuzz 4.4.1 (subtitles)
○ libass 0.16.0 (subtitles)
○ libbluray 1.3.4 (Blu-ray decoding)
○ libdav1d 1.0.0 (AV1 decoding)
○ libdvdread 6.1.3 (DVD decoding)
○ liblzma (xz) 5.2.6 (LZMA video decoding, e.g. TIFF)
○ libjpeg-turbo 2.1.4 (preview image compression)
○ libspeex 1.2.1 (Speex audio decoding)
○ libvpx 1.12.0 (VP8/VP9 video encoding)
○ libxml 2.10.3 (general)
○ oneVPL 2023.1.0 (Intel QSV encoding/decoding)
○ x264 164 r3100 (H.264/AVC video encoding)
○ x265 r12747 (H.265/HEVC video encoding)
○ zimg 3.0.4 (color conversion)
● New libraries
○ SVT-AV1 1.4.1 (AV1 encoding)

Linux
● Added many quality of life improvements contributed by community members
● Improved parity with the Mac and Windows graphical interfaces
● Miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements
● Updated translations
● Added new translations
○ Bulgarian (Български)
○ Finnish (Suomi)
○ Georgian (ქართული)

Mac
● Added Quick Look support to the queue
● Miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements
● Updated translations
● Added Japanese translation

Windows
● Miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements
● Updated all translations
● Added new translations
○ Bulgarian (Български)
○ Dutch (Nederlands)
○ Polish (Polski)