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HandBrake - output format mangles your data integrity
&t@ SOX:
sox asks what is the output format? ... simple answer is: mpeg4. complex answer: texas chain-saw massacre The official position of the Handbrake devs is that they have no obligation to preserve all the original source material during the handbrake conversion process: if you want to keep _all_ of your movies components, then you should roll-up your sleeves & hack out the code yourself ... but first you will have to untangle what - by their own admission on their message boards! - is very messy source code! Handbrake devs regard the Dubs, Subs, and Closed Captions -- let alone the Menus and Angles - as being only of 'marginal' significance to most people ... and certainly not a "priority" for them! Bottom line: the "output format" from Handbrake bears only a passing resemblence to the "input format"! If you want to do something as basic as to keep MULTIPLE soundtracks and languages and commentaries etc etc -- then you are S.O.L. The haughty Handbreak devs simply THROW AWAY YOUR DATA! ... they dont even have the courtesy to save it as separate files so that you can manually paste the tracks back in to the mpeg4 container afterwards! --- alas, this same reckless contempt for data integrity also pervades the devs at MacThe Ripper. I dont know which august school of computer science is teaching that source data can be treated like dirt - but whichever one it is, they should be found out & stopped before their graduates do further harm! .... just imagine if a dev at a bank or at airline or at hospital had the gall to tell their clients that the devs didnt care which data the users needed, they would just have to put up with whatever the devs deigned to give them! Any dev who spouted that kind of fatuous arrogance would not only be tossed out on his ear: he would probably be looking at the other end of a lawsuit! Yet in the opensource world, there seems to be two cultures: one culture is about unfettering the dev (so he can make the changes as he sees fit) and the other culture is about enhancing (not limiting) the choice of the end-user. Many times these two cultures can co-exist (sometimes peacefully, sometimes warily); however in the case of Handbrake, these two cultures seem to be at odds when it comes to fundamental principles of engineering hygine (data integrity) and engineering best-practices/etiquette (UML). Anyways ..... the only people who seem to give you a fighting chance to keep *ALL* your data is the crew that makes 'CINEMATIZE' -- http://www.miraizon.com/products/cine2profeatures.html This app is a commercial product ($100) so at least the devs there are _philosophically_ dedicated to the proposition that the prime aim should be to make tools that the _customers_ want ... not to be a private club that only serves the whims of the devs themselves. BTW 1: The Cinematize folks say that they have NOT tested how their app (which _is_ based on quicktime) works with the El Gato Turbo264 hardware accelerator ($100). BTW 2: Handbrake is _not_ a quicktime app, so it will not work with the hardware accelerators (like elgato or miglia's product) .... ... and the Handbreak devs say that they have no interest in (or responsibility for) creating a driver for hardware accelerators .... should this indifference come as any surprise?! - that was a rhetorical question :-) ---
HandBrake does an excellent job - and is still in development
I find your post very mis-informed.
Cinematise 2 Pro is a US$129.95 product, Handbrake costs nothing. Handbrake is a encoding application with very flexible options offerered in a fairly easy to use manner. Cinematise is intended to extract DVD content into seperated components for use in other authoring programs. Can you show me where the Cinematise web site states I can use their product to produce a convenient "container" of my DVD movie encoded in a newer high compression / high quality format like h.264? As far as I am aware, neither progam rips copy protected DVD's (I was surprised to read claims on this hint that Handbrake does - in earlier versions it claimed not to - and Cinematise certainly does NOT as is stated on their site). You need a program like MacTheRipper to extract the entire DVD content first, then you can process it with app like these. Handbrake offers many encoding options. Limiting those options for basic users would the app less useful to a more knowlegable users. The presets are there for convenience and also the assistance of basic users. Contrary to your reasoning, the support of third party encoding hardware (such as Turbo 264) is intentionally ommited form Handbrake, and will not be supported. This is because by their very design, hardware based encoders have fixed presents are not flexible - they are fast, sure - but fast at encoding files with a very limited range of parameters. The purpose the Handbrake application is to be flexible with an emphasis to high quality. Most of the limitations you are harping on about boil down to one of two things: 1. the container output formats do NOT support them 2. the feature is intentially ommited as it's not the intended purpose of the program Regarding reason 1, the open container format "Matroska" will be incredibly useful when it's adopted broadly. As stated on the project's homepage (www.matroska.org) it is not a video or audio compression format (video codec) rather it is an envelope for which there can be many audio, video and subtitles streams, allowing the user to store a complete movie or CD in a single file. From memory the handbrake developers do intend to include full sopport of the Matroska container format, it takes time to develop and should appear in a future release. In the meantime, other free tools can be used to save subtitles.. but when faced with a foreign language file I generally just use handbrake to output english titles as permanent into the mp4 output file. Often known as "burning" the subtitles into the movie. I would rather use a container format, and I'm patiently waiting.. in the meantime "DVD" is the container format I am using for any precious DVD title rips. When support is available for a better container I will encode them then. Maki
HandBrake - output format mangles your data integrity
Oh come now, I think you're the one being a little arrogant to berate this tool for "throwing away data". That's exactly what it's *supposed* to do. You want to shrink a 4.7+ GB DVD down to ~700MB? Guess what, this is a lossy process! And you can lose less of the data you care about by completely dropping the data you *don't* care about. |
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