CPU-optimized Backend for gHandBrake

Edit: The original author of gHandBrake's site appears to be down and I haven't heard from him since I submitted code to add most of the advanced x264 options to the interface, so I decided to offer my updated version right here (64-bit binary plus source code) until further notice. If you need to compile it for a 32-bit system, I have a list of dependencies for HandBrake here, and precompiled binaries of Yasm Debian/Ubuntu systems here. If you have any problems with any of it, just let me know in the comments and I'll try to help.

You can also download the unmodified gHandBrake (fewer features, but more stable) here. This package includes both the source tarball and a precompiled 64-bit deb binary for Ubuntu/Debian users.

Original post: I've been trying out gHandBrake, the excellent new GTK frontend for HandBrake. It's very early in development, so it doesn't have many of the advanced options--such as advanced x264 options--implemented yet but it seems quite solid and will eventually be a great replacement for HandBrakeGTK/RippedWire, which is basically just an incomplete port of the Windows GUI (of note, HandBrakeGTK does not actually pass advanced x264 options to the commandline).

Unfortunately, the precompiled binaries offered by the author do not appear to utilize HandBrake's processor-specific optimizations, so I decided to offer an optimized 64-bit build of the backend that would:
Download link

To use it, just download and extract, then replace the old ghandbrake-backend with the newer version. In a console, you would type (assuming it was extracted to your desktop):

sudo mv -f ~/Desktop/ghandbrake-backend /usr/bin

Since switching to the updated backend, my average encoding speed went from ~40 fps to ~115 fps, but YMMV.

Of course, if you compiled gHandBrake yourself from source, you would already have the optimizations included as long as you had the yasm assembler installed when you compiled. If you want to go this route, I have a precompiled yasm binary that recognizes SSE3 instructions in my previous post.

Please leave me a comment if you have any questions or concerns.

Posted in: backend,frontend,gHandBrake,HandBrake,optimized,ubuntu