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I have heard a lot about this tool, particularly that it is available on multiple platforms, which is a feature that I really love. So I recently tried this out to see if it could replace the good (but a little simplistic) AutoGK.
The installation and loading of HandBrake was very quick and painless, and was very happy that I only needed to install 1 application (instead of AutoGK's 3-4). The GUI was very intuitive and I could easy see what needed to be done or what operations were available to convert a video. Once I had set the settings for the conversion, I could add the job to the conversion queue.
There were a few minor problems with setting up the job. For starters, regardless of what file extension I wanted the video file to be (I wanted .mp4), the GUI would always choose .m4v, which I most definitely do not want. I was unable to set the resolutionwidth that I wanted for the output at all, which later became frustrating. More annoying was that, when entering the video output size, the GUI would ignore half of the keystrokes I pressed, making a trivial task seem a little more difficult.
When it came to the output files themselves, I was highly impressed with the first job, a DVD using the x264 codec. Quality was great and though the conversion speed was slow, I expect that from a superior codec. However the resolution of the movie was over 1000x pixels across, which seems a bit of a waste when the source is only 720x across.
More unfortunately was when I tried to do another conversion the next night, I woke up the next morning to find the file approximately 10% of what the size should have been and was unplayable. Assuming that I must have entered the size incorrectly due to the program ignoring key strokes, I attempted again the next night on a different movie, but the same thing happened (though the size of the output was now around 25% of what it should have been).
Overall, this tool has potential, and the fact that it can be used on WindowsLinuxMac is very convenient, However the tool isn't quite there yet.
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