Handbrake 0.9.4 was finally released some months ago. It’s still an amazingly useful tool, and probably x264’s most active “vehicle”. But, as before, it’s not without its problems. The GUI is still buggy and flaky at times, probably because of a huge amount of patched spaghetti code. IMO it really just needs to be rewritten, just looking over the source. Handbrake itself has gotten significantly more stable, quicker, and more usable. It’s now quite a useful tool to convert DVDs to MPEG-4 with top-of-the-line codecs and amazing compression.
Perhaps most glaring of its issues, despite the fact that the GUI automatically scales and provides a scroll bar to navigate the interface, it refuses to run when the resolution is too low. It flat-out does not allow the program to run due to this arbitrary limitation – no bypass switches, nothing. It needs to be recompiled. But it works just fine at lower resolutions. You can test this functionality by launching Handbrake at 1024×768 (or higher), minimize the GUI, then change the resolution to 800×600. Restore the GUI, and it suddenly grows scroll bars like magic and it’s still usable. The devs have consistently ignored countless requests to remove this limitation so, well, once again, that’s where I come in.
This is a full installation of the Handbrake application, which can be installed over your existing Handbrake install (you shouldn’t need to have both the original, and this patched version, installed at the same time). Install, and voila! Handbrake on your netbook. As per GPL licensing, the source is available as well.
Download the patched version here.
edit: Fixed some versioning discrepancies that caused Handbrake to pop up prompting for an update right off the bat. Hopefully this does it… the way HB-GUI checks versioning is a fucking nightmare of holy-shit spaghetti code. #1 reason why I hate object-oriented programming. *headdesk*






