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HandBrake

An open-source video transcoder.

HandBrake reads almost any source video — DVDs, Blu-rays via libdvdread/libdvdcss, mp4/mkv files, raw camera output — and re-encodes it into modern formats (H.264, H.265/HEVC, AV1, VP9) with a wide range of presets for devices like phones, tablets, Apple TV, web streaming, and archival. Filters cover deinterlacing, denoise, decomb, sharpen, and chapter editing.

The project began in 2003 as a Mac-only DVD ripper, written by Eric Petit, and has since become cross-platform with Windows, Linux, and macOS GUIs plus a HandBrakeCLI for batch workflows. The core encoding pipeline shells out to x264, x265, and other established encoders.

HandBrake remains one of the most-recommended general-purpose video transcoders. It is widely used for archiving DVD collections, normalising mixed video for archival, preparing videos for upload, and shrinking files for portable devices.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install handbrake
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install HandBrake
Arch:          sudo pacman -S handbrake
macOS:         brew install --cask handbrake