For the last few years, I was using VisualHub as my video transcoder of choice. It was great – it took anything you threw at it and could export in a myriad of formats – FLV, MP4, WMV, iPod friendly version, and so on.
Sadly, the developer of VisualHub recently quit and won’t be updating the software any more*. That’s bad news for us web people who relied on it to do quite a bit of video work for us.
HandBrake, on the other hand, has been another program that’s been in my toolbox for awhile as well. It’s a cross-platform app that will rip DVDs. We use it for legitimate reasons – we often get DVD’s from offices and groups on campus and need to quickly and easily rip those DVDs for use on the web or in other video projects. HandBrake does that job very, very well. It’s got many settings for output but it only output in MP4 and a few other formats. This was usually fine for the work I’m doing.
Yesterday, HandBrake released version 0.9.3 of its software. It now will accept pretty much any media file you throw at it and transcode that to MP4. Unlike VH, it won’t give you outputs to formats like Flash video, but that’s what encoding.com is for I guess.
While it’s cool the HandBrake team updated to allow this new functionality, it seems they took out code that to me seems was the whole point of the app – DVD decoding. Well, not the decoding, but specifically the DVD decryption. If you use VLC, you should still have access to the libraries needed to decode the DVD stream.
* – It looks like there’s an open-source push to create a new version of the VisualHub software. More here.
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