Edible Apple

HandBrake is a must-have app for the Mac that lets you burn DVD’s into a number of varying file formats, and it’s a great way to burn DVD’s onto your computer and get them onto your iPod.

Earlier this week, HandBrake 0.9.4 became available and introduced a number of new improvements and enhancements. Here are a few:

Soft subtitles

HandBrake can now include subtitle tracks that can be turned on and off, instead of rendering them onto the video track permanently (which also reduces video compression). This means you can include Closed Captioning data from DVDs and TV broadcasts, or find SRT text subtitle files on the ‘net and include them. When using the Matroska container, you can also store the graphical subtitle images (VobSubs) from a DVD as a separate track. An added benefit is that multiple subtitle tracks can be included in the same output video.

Live preview

Ever wished you could test HandBrake settings before spending hours on a full encode? Now, you can.

The picture settings and preview sheet has been broken out into a filters and picture settings inspector, and a preview window. The preview window can show you still frames from your source, like always. But it also lets you start to encode a short clip from the current preview with the currently selected settings, and view the results right there inside of HandBrake.

Better input support, for DVD and non-DVD sources alike

HandBrake now uses a better DVD reading library called libdvdnav. This means it can now read some DVDs it had trouble with before, and it can also select different angles on a DVD. As well, some bugs in underlying libraries have been patched.

For non-DVD sources, HandBrake now offers improved transport stream support, especially for high definition sources. A number of decoding bugs have been resolved as well, so Windows users will no longer need fear AAC audio, nor Mac users fear VC-1 video.

You can check out the full list of improvements over here and can download the app here.  Highly recommended!