Handbrake

[wove]

Handbrake <https://handbrake.fr> was originally written for BeOS and has been around since the late 90s. It is a video transcoder and I have used it for over 20 years to convert movie formats. I started with a video capture card in an old PPC Mac, where I would capture video from VHS, then use Handbrake to create a more playable file. Over the years I have added numerous videos to my collection. A new version was released recently and was said to be a big upgrade.

Just something of a side hustle, where I could convert your home videos to files playable on your PC. It took a long time, but the process was mostly automatic. Set it all up and let it run while you slept or went off to work. It has been a few years since I have done any of that and during that time I picked up a couple 3d movies that played side by side frames. I have no idea how there were made to be watched. I thought perhaps it was time to reinstall Handbrake and see what it could do.

Well Handbrake did just fine, a search on the internet turned up directions that said all you really needed to do was crop half the movie out and encode the other half as its own movie. With Handbrake cropping it easy to do, so it did not take long to setup Handbrake.

The last time I was really using Handbrake was back in the days of Core2Duo with 4GB of RAM, and transcoding a two hour movie would take at least two hours and probably more like three to four hours. Handbrake is now installed on a 10th gen 6-core i5, with SSD and 32GB of RAM. This setup transcoded a two hour movie in 7 minutes.

OH how computing power has increased. (The movie transcoding worked excellent and I can now finally watch it after having the 3d file hanging around for several years.)

[bin]

Fascinating stuff - I actually owned and used BEOS back in the late 90's. Never had the need or urge to use handbrake on a 386 with 4Mb RAM though

[wove]

I owned BeOS and I still enjoy looking at Haiku. Haiku has taken to using QT for building a lot of their applications, which are just a lot of ported KDE apps. From an application standpoint is is almost like using a KDE derivative at times.

I did my first video capture on a 68040 Mac with 8MB using an ATI capture card with a whopping 4MB of RAM. I could grab 160X100(?) video at ~10fps. In the end having a .mov file what was not even as clear or nice as @crosscourt's typing man animated GIF. But making that happen really seemed marvelous at the time. Even more marvelous than transcoding a two hour movie in <10 minutes seems today.

[chris]

Did you see this?
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/handb ... amd-nvidia

[wove]

I did not notice that article, however that addition to HandBrake was mentioned in the release notes. Maybe that added to the speed of the transcode as the hardware I used has a Radeon 5300m graphics card.

[crosscourt]

Im aware of Handbrake but Ive never used it.