Instead of doing a post about Cody or Sierra today or anything dog related, I thought we'd share a cool tool we use called HandBrake which is video compression software.
Some of you might be wondering “Why do I need Handbrake?” Well, do you ever get annoyed with how long it takes to upload videos online? Handbrake helps compress videos down so they are smaller and more manageable to upload and share with the world. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the larger something is the longer it takes to move, even in the digital landscape known as the internet.
What's great about Handbrake is that it is 100% free open source software. It's available on several different desktop operating systems which includes Macs, Windows, and Linux Ubuntu which is pretty cool.
For all of the Singing Dogs videos we use Handbrake to compress large high definition 1080p (HD) video files for uploading onto our Youtube channel. (Subscribe if you haven't already!) Typically Handbrake will cut the video file in half, sometimes less, and the dogs and I don't notice any difference in quality from the compressed Handbrake video and the original. It saves a lot of time and bandwidth when are uploading videos, which is good because Verizon sucks in Baltimore. (They refused to bring Verizon FiOS here but for some reason they keep advertising it on TV in the area!) A normal video file for us that might take 1 hour to upload, once we compress it with Handbrake, might only take 20-30 minutes. Cutting down that much for uploading is a huge benefit for us!
We are not sure how Handbrake's video compression works, but it is totally awesome. Also it's cool that is it open source and free since we use it all the time. I would post a link to page to donate to the Handbrake project but I don't see anywhere on the website to do so. They do have ads on the website which any users of Hanbrake, like ourselves, should be clicking on to support the project. 🙂
In addition to video compression Handbrake is really useful for converting video files into MP4s which we do a lot for the Singing Dogs. Most of the time we need to convert from other video formats and Handbrake does it at the same time when it compresses the Singing Dogs videos. Handbrake can be used just for as a video converter tool if that is all you need it for.
Anyway, if you are interested in downloading Handbrake and giving it a test drive, download it here: http://handbrake.fr/