draft
I
have been looking for a transcoding solution in software that is
professional enough to use for my various purposes. Previously I was
using Canopus Procoder 2/3, but Canopus was bought by Greenvalley,
which was bought by Thompson, which is now called Technicolor and the
product is discontinued. When I last looked at Handbrake, which was
a few years ago, it only seemed to be available for the Mac and was
too consumer oriented for my needs.
But
to my amazement, Handbrake is also available in GUI form for Windows
and in command line form for Linux. It is open source and available
from France where it is apparently legal to have MP3/MP4/MP2 codecs
built into your free software.
Using
it on Windows, I have done preliminary tests and it seems to be
acceptable. I wont know where the feature gaps are until I use it
more. But to begin with, I have been able to excerpt one minute of
footage from a high resolution 2 hour mp4 and convert it to various
formats and resolutions.
Although
it clearly does not give access to all the video features that
Canopus Procoder 2/3 did, it does allow you access to some and I wont
know if this is sufficient or limiting until I use it a lot more.
It
does not appear to have any malware or annoying advertisements.
I
wish to emphasize how important the “open source” quality of this
software matters to me. Those with money do not need to worry about
a product disappearing, they can always buy something else. Those
without money need to worry about whether a tool they choose for
their work will continue to exist and be available. Open source
software, although far from being a panacea for professionals and
artists at least has the quality that it is unlikely to just
disappear.
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