Handbrake Vs AME quality

[Mike Poliskey]

Hi,

Quick question about handbrake – is this some wonderful encoder that massively beats AME about quality/file size? I’ve just found some videos on YT promising excellent compression ratio without losing quality, so I’m curious of your opinion.

Mike

[Wesley Lim]

Yes, handbrake is by far and a large margin much better than media encoder or apple’s compressor in terms of quality, speed and file size. I can’t believe it either, free software performing better in every way compared to the stuff we pay for.

I was requested by a client to provide a 720p 30 second video in a maximum file size of only 2MB (I had to double check that this wasn’t a typo multiple times) After trying insane compression ratios on AME, I still kept getting files over 14MB and the image looked insanely bad (the image quality was unsurprising and not a huge concern because I warned the client that the files would look chewed up already)

Anyway, to get down to 2MB I eventually tried using handbrake and the file I got was not only actually 2MB, it compressed much faster than AME and the 2MB file looks just as good as the 30MB file that I got from AME. I had to eat my words and send it to the client but now I know if I need some tiny video files the only way to go is handbrake. For regular exports I’m still not sure, having to export everything before putting it in handbrake for a second pass is a lot of hassle to go through, I’m not sure if the performance/speed savings are worth it if I have to sit by the exports to bring them over instead of just leaving them running overnight.