HandBrake, was MediaFork, was HandBrake

As part of our continuing discussion on media tools for the Mac, Martin Jones, MiFi.ca’s resident Über Geek, offers the following report on HandBrake-MediaFork (ed).

While there are many DVD rippers out there, for a long while HandBrake was the best of the lot for the Mac. HandBrake was more-or-less a front end for a set of command line tools that decrypted the DVD stream and then compressed it into MPEG4 or MPEG4-AVC (advanced video codec, AKA h.264) format in a single shot, ready for playback on a portable device (read iPod).

That was the good part. The bad part was the relatively ancient encoding library it was based on. This made MPEG4 encoding pretty slow and h.264 encoding unbearably slow. The settings were ambiguous, even cryptic, and it took much trial and error to get the desired results. HandBrake’s development stagnated about a year ago and it seemed like there would be no more updates forthcoming.

Then, new developers took it upon themselves to build an application heavily based on HandBrake. They called it MediaFork, and it was Good. MediaFork brought many bug fixes, and leveraged updated libraries. Encoding became reliable and fast. The interface is still ambiguous, even cryptic, but now you can tab through the video preview to see the effect of your settings on the media, and the program won’t crash. Overall, MediaFork is a welcome improvement on the work begun with HandBrake.

Last week the HandBrake developers posted that they had joined forces with the MediaFork development team and that a soon-to-be-released version of the software, the result of their combined effort, will be released as HandBrake 0.9.0.

HandBrake is dead! Long live HandBrake!

– Martin Jones