Handbrake, the ultimate open-source, cross platform video conversion utility

Whenever I rip DVD’s or convert videos to fit on my iPhone I always use a program called Handbrake. I have used many other video converters, and thus far Handbrake is the best I have encountered. Handbrake is open-source, and also available across multiple OS’s. The version I use is for Mac, but there are also versions available for Windows and Linux. Best of all, it’s free to download. Check out some of the specs:

Supported sources:

• Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (encrypted or unencrypted, but protection methods other than CSS are not supported and must be handled externally with third-party software), and some .VOB and .TS files
• PAL or NTSC
• AC-3, DTS, LPCM or MPEG audio tracks

Outputs:

• File format: MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM
• Video: MPEG-4 or H.264 (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer/rate encoding)
• Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)

Misc features:

• Chapter selection
• Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture)
• Integrated bitrate calculator
• Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
• Grayscale encoding

Credits

HandBrake uses a lot of (L)GPL librairies from the Linux world:

• liba52 (AC3 decoding)
• libavcodec (picture cropping, scaling and deinterlacing, MPEG-4 encoding)
• libdvdcss (CSS decryption)
• libdvdread (DVD navigation)
• libfaac (AAC encoding)
• libmp3lame (MP3 encoding)
• libmp4v2 (MP4 muxing)
• libmpeg2 (MPEG-2 decoding)
• libogg (OGM muxing)
• libsamplerate (audio resampling)
• libvorbis (Vorbis encoding)
• libx264 (H264 encoding)
• libxvidcore (MPEG-4 encoding)

-Jameson

[Source: HandBrake]