HandBrake 0.9.3 has been released and it will now accepts practically any type of video as a source. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

NEW FEATURES:

Universal input
HandBrake is no longer limited to DVDs: it will now accept practically any type of video as a source. This massive enhancement was achieved by tapping into the power of libavcodec and libavformat from the FFmpeg project.

Linux GUI
There is now an official GTK graphical interface for Linux, available as a binary for Ubuntu. This is the real deal, interacting directly with HandBrake's core library instead of just putting a pretty face on a command line interface. It has full feature parity with the Mac interface.

Video quality
The x264 project has really come into its own this year, and HandBrake 0.9.3 integrates the latest improvements to the H.264 encoding library. Picture quality has enhanced dramatically through the use of psychovisual rate distortion and adaptive quantization, and there have been significant speed optimizations.

Audio flexibility
HandBrake now offers total control over multiple audio tracks.

No more internal DVD decryption
Yeah, we know, no one reading this is going "Oh wow, no more DVD decryption--what a great new feature!" but...deal.

HandBrake will dynamically load VLC's copy of libdvdcss if you have it in your Applications folder in Mac OS X, and if you're on Linux, and you want to live on the wild side, you can install libdvdcss on your system and get the same effect.

Translation of the last paragraph from nerdese:
We're not about to stop you from choosing to decrypt DVDs. If you're on a Mac, and you have VLC 0.9.x installed, you won't even notice the internal capability's gone. If you're on Linux, all you have to do is install a library.

Persistent queues
When queueing up a bunch of videos to encode, you need no longer fear a crash in HandBrake's graphical interfaces. Queued jobs are cached to disk for safekeeping between sessions.

New, better organized presets (Be sure to run "Update Built-In Presets" from the Presets menu!)
The presets are now "nested" in folders and have evolved. Notably, there is a new Apple "Universal" preset, designed to play and look good doing so on anything from an iPod Nano to an AppleTV.

There have been many changes to most of them. Please be aware that most presets now use different settings. This means most of them are not suited for benchmarking 0.9.3 against 0.9.2. For example, the AppleTV preset is slower because it is now quality based, and produces much more efficient output. The Normal preset uses psychovisual rate distortion. The High Profile presets use psychovisual trellising. All of these setting changes can influence encoding time and output file size.

For comparison purposes, there are several presets in the Apple->Legacy folder (the old iPod High-Rez, the old AppleTV, and the old iPhone presets) which remain unchanged since 0.9.2.

Audio-video synchronization
HandBrake should now keep lip-synch as well as a DVD player can.

Decomb filter
HandBrake now offers a decomb filter, in the style of AviSynth's. It is a deinterlacer that can be left on all the time without degrading picture quality, because it only deinterlaces video when it visibly needs to be.

Multi-threaded deinterlacing
The "Slow" and "Slower" filters, as well as the new decomb filter, will now take advantage of as many processors as you can throw at them.
"Same as source framerate" really is the same as the source framerate

HandBrake now, by default, passes through the exact video framerate of the source instead of smoothing to a constant rate, which could lead to frames being duplicated or dropped.

Theora video encoding
HandBrake now can encode video using the Theora codec.

Updated libraries
Besides x264, updated libraries include libsamplerate, libogg, xvidcore, libmpeg2, lame, faac, and ffmpeg's libavcodec, libavformat, and libswscale.

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The SBSettings 1.3.4 Toggle Pack updates the Wi-Fi and Phone toggles for the iPhone 2.2 Firmware, according to BigBoss.

I have released an updated toggle pack that updates the Wifi and Phone toggles for FW 2.2. If you do not have FW 2.2, then you will find no change. For all of you that had issues on 2.2 with these toggles, I hope it helped. The toggles should behave just like they did on 2.1 now. They are both much faster and don’t take 30-60 seconds while safari is running. Yay!

RiP Dev has just released Pusher. A Mac OS X Jailbreaking tool that installs Installer, and other tools. Pusher works differently however; it installs files onto the user partition of the phone without opening the system partition up. It works for both 2G and 3G phones running 2.0.2, 2.1 and 2.2 firmwares. It is currently Mac OS X only, with a Windows Version releasing soon.


So my point is simple - jailbreak is no longer needed in its "traditional" form for most people. This is why we have developed a tool that does something else... and it's absolutely amazing. Here's what it does: it puts some tools (including our own Installer) onto the user partition of the phone without opening the system partition up! You get Installer, a whole world of third-party tools that didn't got into the AppStore for some reason, such as Kate, Qik, Snapture, and dozens of others, all that without compromising your security!


The tool is named Pusher (mostly because it pushes some things onto the iPhone, and because we found the allusion funny). It works for both 2G and 3G phones running 2.0.2, 2.1 and 2.2 firmwares. Simply download it, launch and follow the instructions on-screen - the whole process takes about 3 minutes.


To make your life even sweeter, we went ahead and added a few things for free that we thought might be useful - an alternative system font, an ability to set your SpringBoard background, two alternative Cyrillic keyboards, and a few other extras that might become useful. The Mac OS X version is available for download immediately, with a Microsoft Windows one following shortly after.

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