Handbrake 0.10.0 released (opens in new tab)

Maybe I don't understand what you want to do, but for at least 3 years I've been able to load a video clip in, set up the settings, add to queue, load video, add to queue, repeat. Then process the whole queue overnight.

It can batch convert a whole Folder without having to add individual files and always has been. One of the worst ui choices for it though, there is a well hidden menu item called add all. Took me forever to find it

check out this script by Don Melton: https://github.com/donmelton/video-transcoding-scripts

there are other more professional software out there for automated workflow. An example of this is: http://www.telestream.net/episode/overview.htm

The last time I tried x265, about half a year I was really disappointed. For what I tried (a low bitrate encode with a very slow encode, Hi10p profile for x264) x264 was only slightly worse for the same crf (witch x264 and x265 share) - less than 15% worse, but the encoding time for x264 was practical (on my machine about 2 frames per second) while x265 was simply to slow for real-world use for me (about 0.1 fps). My Computer is somewhat old, but I doubt that newer PCs would to so much better. I can't even image how long it takes to encode 8k.

I realise this is subjective but how's the quality of x265? What's the encoding speed like in comparison to x264?

You could try just using ffmpeg (depending on your definition of easy). In most instances it will simply be a case of something like

  ffmpeg -i input -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -c:a libfdk_aac output.mkv

It has a gui with presets I thought was straightforward and a good cli that can be used with batch files. For free software I think it does a good job, if you want to split hairs the contrast in very dark scenes gets "blotchy".

Adapter (http://www.macroplant.com/adapter/) could be what you're looking for

I've never had any audio sync problems with Handbrake, then again I've never done anything 'exotic' (basically encode my dvd's to x264+audio passthrough) and everything has worked fine.

During the last three years I have installed Handbrake twice to convert a just created WMV to H.264/AAC. On both occasions Handbrake just failed to do anything for the file and I ended up uninstalling it. Later I created a kilometer long ffmpeg command line and been happily creating files to be used with Flowplayer. Those files have been playing without any issues on iOS, Android, Windows, Linux and MacOSX.

I wonder why this Windows Live Movie Maker output turned out to be problematic for Handbrake, but on the other hand now I haven't needed to start any video conversion GUI for a long time.

would distributing a shell script that automated that install/compile process be legal?

OS X's built-in AAC encoder is the best available, so it doesn't need a replacement.

On the other hand, QSV is entirely outclassed by x264 quality-wise, and I could only recommend it for heat/battery power savings (useful for AirPlay Mirroring, not so much for DVD backups).

It is odd that OpenCL programs wouldn't work, but that can't be much more, uh, work.

I think the addition of NLMeans is interesting, since that filter is so slow I've only ever used it for photo processing.

You'll have to spend a great deal of time to beat the presets already used by Handbrake/x264, and you'll only be able to do it on a particular clip. There's a good article[1] on the presets and how they impact quality, which lead me to using slow or slower for pretty much everything.

[1] http://www.videoquality.pl/preset-settings-x264-quality-comp...

"VidCoder is a DVD/Blu-ray ripping and video transcoding application for Windows. It uses HandBrake as its encoding engine." -- 1st sentence on VidCoder's site

I think you mean VidCoder has a better interface for HandBrake on Windows then HandBrake? I haven't had any problems w/ HandBrake's UI on Windows, but I keep it pretty simple so maybe if you want to do more complex things VidCoder is better.

Experts estimate that there are approximately millions [0] of AV converters around. At least, in my experience.

[0] not really