10/24/2021 0 Comments Old Handbrake For Mac
Though if you want/need to for whatever reason, the old rundown of Handbrake settings (0.9.6) guide should help explain all those options for you in great detail (note that in v0.10 you may need to enable the x264 advanced options panel in the Handbrake settings/preferences located in the drop-down menu).Note that since v0.10 is very similar to v0.9.9, I’ve simply updated this guide with v0.10-specific additions in orange (like this!).I’ll use some images this time around to help make things quick & easy. Seashore is an open source image editor for Mac OS Xs Cocoa framework.Getting something that amounts to the “best settings” is a whole lot easier in v0.9.9 and v0.10.The “x264 presets” are now in Handbrake, and 99% of the time, that should mean that you don’t have to dabble in the “x264 Advanced Options Panel”. Just click the Source button on top and choose a video file.Previous blogs in this series: Is this a codec (or a container) which I see. You only need to care about the Source panel in this step. You'll see the following interface if everything is OK. Double click on the app icon to see whether it can start properly.Most people aim for something in between. Moving the slider to the extreme left (or using a low enough Average Bitrate), and you can get really small file sizes, but something looking pretty ugly. Move the Constant Quality RF slider far enough to the right (or use a high enough Average Bitrate) and the video will be large, and look indistinguishable from your source. These have the largest impact on quality & file size.Sliding to the left (higher numbers) result in lower quality, but lower filesizes too. The downside is that you don’t know how large each video will be until the end.RF – Sliding to the right (lower numbers) lead to better quality. The advantage to Constant Quality is that your videos all tend to look consistent. This targets a certain level of quality throughout your video(s). (click for a larger image)Constant Quality – Usually this is the preferred method. I’m really going to be simplifying the rest below (it won’t be 100% technically accurate, but accurate enough to give you an understanding).First, a quick image to give you an idea as to what Constant Quality entails….
![]() Old Handbrake Mac OS XsAdvantage to Average Bitrate is that you can effectively pre-determine your file size. Helpful if you wanted each of your movies to be exactly 700MB for example. Most people experiment to find an RF value that looks good enough to them at a file size they can handle, and use that RF value most of the time, deviating slightly when need be.RF examples – Here are a couple screenshots taken at different RF settings (one at 20, and one at 30) to give you a very rough starting point (click for a larger view):For a more in-depth look at RF values, check out Comparing x264 “RF” settings in Handbrake (examples) for the full write-up.And an image to give you an idea as to what Average Bitrate entails… (click for a larger image)Average Bitrate – Using this and a calculator, you can aim for a specific file size given a certain video length. Here’s how it might turn out: Online bitrate calculators are the easiest way to do this.Looking at Constant Quality vs Average Bitrate from another perspective…:Let’s pretend we’re encoding a 1 hour TV series from DVD with constant quality and have determined that RF:22 looks just-good-enough to us. 2 pass encoding when using this option used to be strongly recommended, but it’s generally not thought to be as important anymore unless you need a precise file size (“turbo” first pass is okay if you don’t mind losing a little precision in size).Kbps – The higher this is, the larger the file will be (and thus, the higher the quality). Or maybe the file size was higher than it needed to be. ![]() Episode 4: 798kbps (avg video bitrate) – 323.5MBThe TOTAL SIZE is the same. Episode 3: 798kbps (avg video bitrate) – 323.5MB Episode 2: 798kbps (avg video bitrate) – 323.5MB Either way, we’re now in a situation where Episode 1 looks stellar, but in Episodes 2 & 3, things are below our standards, looking notably worse.That doesn’t mean that average bitrate is *bad*. Episode 4 got close to the ideal amount for our “ RF:22 looked good to us” standards and probably looks identical to the RF:22 version from before. Episodes 2 & 3 probably didn’t get enough. Changing this won’t substantially affect the quality any further (if you wanted higher quality, move the RF slider more to the right). Play with RF values until you find values where the video looks good enough to you on the devices you play back from, at file sizes you find acceptable.As mentioned above, this has a different effect depending on whether you went with Constant Quality, or Average Bitrate.If you went with Constant Quality, your quality has already been “decided”. And at that point, I’d have been better off using Constant Quality with a better RF value.Short version: Unless you desperately need your file to come out at an exact size, use Constant Quality. Unfortunately, that means my total filesize for 4 more episodes similar to the above would now be 1622MB instead of just 1294MB. If I were encoding the rest of the season via “average bitrate”, I’d probably be encoding everything at 1000kbps to be on the safe side. So if you use average bitrate, you may have to “pad” your numbers a bit just in case some of your videos need the extra bitrate to look okay. Changing this won’t affect the file size any further. If you want more detail about the RF value and CQ, I’ve got a separate writeup to help clarify all of that (with charts) at Handbrake RF + slower speeds = craziness.If you went with Average Bitrate, your file size has already been “decided”. Note that the 3rd setting (very fast) behaves very oddly with Constant Quality and I suggest you avoid using it. Either way, it should look about the same. Free blu ray movies onlineCompared to “veryslow”, the “placebo” setting takes forever and a day. This is one of those areas where you’ll have to experiment on your machine and find something reasonable.Keep in mind that there are diminishing returns as you get slower. The veryslow preset is about the most hard-core anyone should typically get, and it can take a long time even on a quick machine. Going with faster settings here will result in less quality.Details: This is where the time tradeoff comes into play. To be honest, you don’t have to really understand what they do – other people have done the grunt work figuring them out, so they’re whittled down to pretty simple “one size fits all” settings.None – This is like the “old” Handbrake presets. But a 600MB encode of the same TV show will trounce both of them even if it was done at really fast settings.In general, these focus on shifting “bits” between detailed & flat areas, depending on the setting. Sure, a 350MB TV show encoded at really slow settings will look better than the same 350MB TV show encoded at fast settings. Slow settings will let you get more bang-for-your-buck, but it’s not going to work miracles. On the other hand, the difference between “ultrafast” and “medium” (skipping superfast, veryfast, faster, and fast) might only be a few minutes and will often give a quite noticeable difference.Finally, when on the quest for quality, keep in mind that days of encode time is no substitute for simply choosing a better Constant Quality or higher Average Bitrate. Even worse, you might not even notice the visual difference (it’s called “placebo” for a reason). These stand for “peak signal to noise ratio” and “structural similarity”. Note that this tries to KEEP the grain, which uses a boatload of bitrate, and tends to result in higher file sizes when using Constant Quality (if you’re using Avg Bitrate, make sure you’re using a high bitrate, or overall quality will suffer.).Stillimage – For still images (slideshow/pictures).PSNR/SSIM – Generally for testing/comparative purposes. For example, movies like 300 or Saving Private Ryan (the beach scene). It’s something of a middle-road setting.Film – For TV/Movies/Film and 3D animation (Pixar movies for example)Animation – For 2D animation (Mikey Mouse, Simpsons, etc)Grain – For very grainy movies/shows.
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