Alternative to handbrake.

[degarb]

I am looking for a handbrake alternative that can do all handbrake can but work. Willing to pay small amount. Anyone know of one?

I hate to watch dvds, and rather watch a 700 kps h264 over my home network on my laptop. Elby>handbrake>vlc

The problem is handbrake is broken. Dot net doesn't install on all machines; The thing can seldom read and figure out a title; the thing hangs on up updating progress; the forum is broken as posts concerning serious issues not in wiki never get posted and if you complain in off topic forum, you get banned from their forum (only proving that even human moderators can attack rather than discuss and should never be trusted to censor all posts).

I wrote a handhang.ahk (kills dos window after file transcodes and forces the handbrake queue to continue since it wont on own ) and brakedir101.ahk (one click encodes all vob files to default audio track which we hope is your language. uses cli.exe of handbrake if installed.) http://akronedge.info/handbrake

My other feeling is I see much better quality with wma at 500 kps at vbr than 262. according to http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7583287/description.html it looks like microsoft has morphing between frames, face detection down in low bitrates while h264 if behind.

[Baldrick]

I would try StaxRip.

[minerva.thegift]

Hmm, not sure what's going on with Handbrake - it's worked very well for me. Nevertheless, you might try MeGUI (graphical front end for the command line based mencoder.) I used it off and on for a few years and while it is not quite as 'smooth' as handbrake (sometimes a few more steps are involved) it gives good results and is generally more customizable than handbrake (and it fully supports x264 video encoding.) If you do decide to go that route, I'd look in the Guides section of VideoHelp for a good guide since it can be a bit hard to get used to.

[degarb]

Thanks for these responses!

Give me a week or so to try them.

I know I would spend more of my time trying to get handbrake to read each dvd title than actually extracting the dvd. Right now, I was working on a single click to encode directory wrapper for HandbrakeCli.exe that will read title and encode each dvd a single file, then if no output file possible (say, no title found) it will a conversion for all vobs in each sub directory. So, for ex., you just extract to, say, j:\handin\ and each dvd title being sub of that dir; one click encode all extracted dvds with a mutable ini stored preset and prefered preset subtitle. I will need a few uninterupted hours of spare time to complete and test the writing.

(Funny thing is Handbrake gui unable to read some titles that the command line can. So, some bug, but not worth trying to post in their forum for reasons I described above.)

[minerva.thegift]

Reading around on the Handbrake forums, it looks like they are in a feature freeze in preperation to release a new stable version and that's supposed to come out in the next few weeks (though you know how release schedules can go sometimes.) Still, I'm hopeful this will fix many of the issues.

[degarb]

I am also wondering...for a command line bat file, is all you need handbrakecli.exe and cygwin1.dll? Or does something in registry or system32 need to be present before this will work?

[degarb]

Only these two files needed for bat mode. Dot net only needed for gui.