Handbrake 0.9.4 Netbook resolution patched
February 7, 2010Handbrake 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.
Look closer - shit bricks.
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*
Thank you for this. . . Very helpful. Some developers can get very short-sighted about their programs — you’d think it might occur to them that some of us are using their programs differently than they are, like to simply need to open the thing up to be able to walk another user over the video conversion steps over the phone, as opposed to trying to rip a whole DVD this here netbook which has no DVD drive. Oh well.
Thanks.
Thanks for doing this so I don’t have to recompile myself! I don’t understand why the possibility of scrollbars is anathema to the official Handbrake devs…
this is great but cannot download, it says my IP is already downloading
lrn2torrent.
Thanks so much, this really helps!
Thanks for doing this. Heaven forbid they ever support a use case like using a netbook to RDP into another system to actually run it.
thank you, for the netbook version of handbrake v0.9.4.
. anyone who can’t download from rapidshare here is a mirror link –> http://www.megaupload.com/?d=IWT6LEG0
You freakin’ rock! I’m just glad you did this so I didn’t have to… Because I really didn’t feel like going into the code myself… So it is very much appreciated!
PS- I loved your “error message.” Made my day!
Dilligan
Thank you so much!!! Greetings from Chile
Will you be making a patched version for the latest version of handbrake?
That would be cool.
Awh jeez! Didn’t even know a new version finally came out. HB devs like to push their releases waaaayyyyyy far apart, and 0.9.5 was so buggy, I’ve been using nightly builds… I’ll add this to my ever-growing to-do list. Thanks for the heads-up!
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Dude, you are my hero. I was using Handbrake 0.9.5 on my netbook running WinXP and was able to bypass the problem by fudging my screen resolution. But Win 7 does NOT allow you to virtually extend your resolution and thus Handbrake would not work at all. I was using my netbook to convert the last 9 years of home video for my Apple TV, and I’m so dependent on this program that I was ready to buy an external monitor just so I could use it. Instead, I found your patch, uninstalled version 0.9.5, installed your version of 0.9.4, and saved a lot of money on a monitor I really didn’t want to buy.
Thank you so much, finally I can compress my huge ass high def episodes of SnO! I couldn’t be happier with this mod!
link death
[...] 1024×768… Even regular desktop applications have issues running on netbooks. e.g. Handbrake refuses to run and I am sure you have come across dialog boxes which are too tall to fit on the screen making it [...]
This must be a joke. I was looking for an alternative to MediaCoder when I stumbled over Handbrake on Wikipedia. It seems to be great.
But i do not understand why the devs would not remove this arbitrary limit. Has it something to do with DotNET programming guidelines or is it just to bully netbook users? I mean come on!