HandBrake AV1 video transcoding gets hardware speed boost on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs

HandBrake Team this week released HandBrake 1.7.0 which adds support for hardware-accelerated AV1 transcoding on the latest graphics processors from AMD and Nvidia. As a result, HandBrake 1.7.0 now supports hardware-accelerated AV1 transcoding on all popular modern GPUs, including those from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. In addition, the new version of HandBrake also quadruples the performance of SVT-AV1 encoding on Apple Silicon-based Macs thanks to CPU optimizations. 

Starting from version 1.7.0, HandBrake supports the AMD VCN AV1 encoder that is used by AMD's Radeon 7000-series graphics processors (RDNA 3), as well as the Nvidia 8th Gen NVENC encoder built into GeForce 40-series (Ada Lovelace) graphics chips. Both these GPU families are used in some of the best graphics cards. Previously HandBrake 1.6.0 gained support for Intel's Xe AV1 encoder supported by Xe and Arc-branded GPUs. Therefore, HandBrake can take advantage of hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding on all popular contemporary GPUs, except those integrated into Apple Silicon processors. 

HandBrake is one of the world's most popular transcoding programs. Its main advantage is that it supports virtually all widespread codecs on all hardware and software platforms. HandBrake's software-based SVT-AV1 is a very efficient encoder that supports all kinds of CPUs, which means that HandBrake can run on virtually everything. Meanwhile, hardware-accelerated processing is both faster and more power efficient, which brings loads of advantages, particularly on laptops running on battery power. 

Since version 1.7.0 is a major release for HandBrake, it brings loads of important improvements and a full list can be found over at GitHub. While improved support for HDR or added support for Apple VideoToolbox are significant enhancements in the newest version of the software, perhaps the most important tweak is the added support for drag and drop of multiple files at once on Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows-based systems.