HandBrake 1.4 Adds 10 & 12-bit Encoding, Apple Silicon, Qualcomm ARM64 Support

HandBrake, free and open-source video transcoding app, announced new 1.4.0 feature release!

HandBrake 1.4.0 refined its engine to support native 10 and 12-bit encodes, including HDR10 metadata passthru.

So what’s 10-bit & 12-bit encoding

10-bit and 12-bit refer to color depth. With RGB color, each value is stored using a unit that is measured in bits.

The standard 8-bit can produce 256 (2^8) variations of red, green, and blue, and more than 16 million of total colors. 10-bit means 1024 (2^10) variations of RGB color, as well as more than 1 billion discrete colors. And 12-bit for 4,096 permutations per color, 68 billion colors.

While 8-bit was the VGA stand for many years, we can now have more colors with 4K HDR displays. However, 10 and 12-bit will cause more storage usage. And you probably need a prodigious and bright display to tell the difference.

By releasing HandBrake 1.4.0, x264, x265, Intel QuickSync, and Apple Video Toolbox encoders support for higher than 8-bit. Though, it still run at 8-bit rather than 10/12-bit with following filter enabled:

  • Detelecine
  • Decomb
  • Comb Detect
  • Denoise
  • Nlmeans
  • Chroma Smooth
  • Lapsharp
  • Unsharp
  • Grayscale

The new release also add new devices support, including Mac with Apple Silicon, Windows on Qualcomm ARM64.

Other changes include:

  • New filter: Chroma Smooth, Colourspace Selection.
  • And new encoder: Media Foundation
  • MP2 Audio Passthru support.
  • Support for DVB Subtitles, and EIA608 Closed Captions.
  • Reduce temporary disk usage for static preview.
  • And much more!

How to Get HandBrake for Linux:

The official release note, as well as Linux, Windows, Mac OS binary packages are available at the link below:

Linux users can either wait your Distro’s package update, or download the “HandBrake-xxx.flatpak” package. It’s an universal Linux flatpak package runs in sandbox.

To install the flatpak, firstly install the daemon via command:

  • For Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint:
    sudo apt install flatpak
  • And for Fedora, Redhat:
    sudo dnf install flatpak
  • For Arch Linux, Manjaro:
    sudo pacman -S flatpak

Next, run command to install the downloaded flatpak file:

flatpak install /PATH/TO/FLATPAK

Hi, I'm Merilyn Ne, a computer geek working on Ubuntu Linux for many years and would like to write useful tips for beginners. Forgive me for language mistakes. I'm not a native speaker of English.