If you’ve ever wanted to encode one of the DVDs in your personal collection so that you can watch it on the go with your iOS device, you’ve no doubt discovered the wonder that is HandBrake, now with even more awesome.
The groovy cats behind the open-source HandBrake software announced on Monday that the Mac OS X, Windows and Linux versions have been updated to 0.9.5. While that’s only a one-point jump from the previous 0.9.4 released in late 2009, the new update actually brings a lot of welcome tweaks to the all-in-one DVD converter.
Among the core changes to HandBrake 0.9.5 are structure support for Blu-ray discs, although you’ll have to decrypt them through other means since it’s not currently supported from HandBrake. The software works with VLC to decrypt regular DVDs, and now you can store VLC in either the main system Applications folder or your user Applications folder and HandBrake will find it as necessary.
HandBrake now has updated presets, including the black Apple TV as well as the iPad and iPhone 4, although for users with more than one iOS device, you’ll likely want to continue to use the Universal preset for the best possible compatibility with all of them. The internal x264 and ffmpeg libraries have been updated and AC3 encoding support has been added along with audio downmix support.
At long last, HandBrake will batch scan files that you open in the program -- although that doesn’t extend to DVD VIDEO_TS folders or image files. The new Audio panel now supports more than four audio tracks in the Mac version, and perhaps the most welcome change is improved DVD Main Feature detection, which has become challenging with many new studio discs that are authored in an effort to disguise which track is the real one.
HandBrake 0.9.5 is a free download, as always -- the update didn’t show up for us when we checked for it from inside version 0.9.4, so you might want to hit the website directly to download your copy.
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