0.24.0

This version was originally tagged and released on the date below. These notes were added on GitHub much later so the creation date won't match.

Sunday, February 24, 2019

• Add --audio-format and --keep-ac3-stereo options to transcode-video. Thanks to @samhutchins for the idea and design! Via #254.
  • With the --audio-format option, you can now specify whether AC-3 or AAC is used when surround or stereo output tracks are created.
  • This allows multichannel 5.1 AAC audio output by adding --audio-format surround=aac to your command line. However, you may want to pair that with --audio-width main=surround to avoid two AAC tracks of the same input being created.
  • Think of the --keep-ac3-stereo option as a kinder, gentler form of the --prefer-ac3 option.
  • It copies rather than transcodes AC-3 stereo or mono audio tracks even when the current stereo format is AAC, but it doesn't affect surround tracks.
• Deprecate the --prefer-ac3 option in transcode-video and remove its description from the --help output. Also via #254.
  • The option still works for now, but using it issues a warning message.
  • You can get the exact same functionality by adding --audio-width all=surround --audio-format all=ac3 to your command line.
  • However, you might want to add --audio-width all=surround --keep-ac3-stereo instead since you'll get higher quality and slightly smaller output, albeit with some AAC tracks in your output when stereo audio in non-AC-3 format still needs to be transcoded.
• Add a minimal argument to the --fallback-crop option in transcode-video which determines the smallest possible crop values, when using the--crop detect option and argument, by combining results from both HandBrakeCLI and ffmpeg. Thanks to @dkoenig01 for the idea! Via #255.
• Relax validation criteria for HandBrake-generated .log files in query-handbrake-log as workaround for HandBrakeCLI spewing linkage failure warnings on certain Linux platforms. Via #257.