While Ubuntu repositories only provide an old version, the popular Handbrake video transcoder has reached the 0.10.1 release for a while. And there are hundreds of new features, changes, and bug fixes in the new releases.

At the moment, the official Handbrake PPA does not contain the packages for Ubuntu 15.04. We can alternatively install Handbrake 0.10.1 in Vivid either from Marc Deslauriers’s PPA (unofficial) with black widgets fixes or using the official .deb installer for Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic.

HandBrake with blank widget

Install HandBrake 0.10.1 from Marc Deslauriers’s PPA

Open terminal from the Dash or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run below commands one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:mdeslaur/handbrake

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install handbrake

The packages in the PPA were built with Unity’s Overlay Scrollbars disabled to fix the blank widgets (see picture above) issue.

Install HandBrake 0.10.1 using .deb for 14.10 Utopic:

If you want download the .deb installer for 14.10 from the links below:

.deb installer for 64-bit

.deb installer for 32-bit

Once downloaded, open the package with Ubuntu Software Center from its context (right-click) menu and click install it.

To manually fix the blank widgets issue, disable overlay scrollbar for Handbrake only by running below command to edit its .desktop file:

gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/ghb.desktop

Install gksu from Software Center if the command doesn’t work. When the file opens, change the value of Exec to env LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0 ghb %f so it look likes:

That’s it. Enjoy!

The HandBrake video transcoder got a new update recently by releasing the 0.10 release, which brings hundreds of new features, changes, and bug fixes.

HandBrake is a free and open-source multithreaded transcoding app, available for Windows, OS X and Ubuntu. After several beta and RC releases, version 0.10 was finally released one year and a half after the last 0.9.9 release.

What’s new in HandBrake 0.10:

The new release introduced several new encoders:

• Intel QuickSync Video, a hardware based H.264 encoder that is available on Intel CPUs. Currently, QSV is only supported on Windows. Linux support will be available in future release.
• H.265 is now available through x265 1.4. It’s still under heavy active development and is only going to improve over time!
• Deprecated Theora (VP3) in favour of VP8 which is a more modern encoder offering better quality encodes at lower file sizes.
• Due to GPL compatibility issues, LibFaac has been replaced by the libav AAC encoder as the default for Windows and Linux.
• Added the FDK AAC encoder for Windows and Linux as a optional compile-time option. The Mac release will continue to use CoreAudio as the default.
• A number of the core libraries including x264 and libav has been updated.

The HandBrake 0.10 also brings the new NLMeans filter that offers much higher quality denoising. In addition to the default Lanczos scaling algorithm, HandBrake now offers BiCubic scaling on Windows via OpenCL.

The audio and subtitle controls have been overhauled to support default behaviours which can be stored in presets. This simplifies the workflow for many batch encoding scenarios. For Linux, now requires GTK+ 3.

For more details, check out the release note.

How to Install HandBrake 0.10 in Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10:

The developer has made the binary packages into the official HandBrake PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Linux Mint 17.

To add the PPA, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run the command below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-releases

Type in your user password when it asks and press Enter to continue.

After that, install HandBrake via your package manager after checking for updates. Or just run the commands below one by one:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk handbrake-cli

That’s it. Enjoy!