HandBrake For Linux

Windows and macOS users are usually the ones getting spoiled when it comes to a broad choice of software. This is also true when it comes to video converters.

Thankfully, there's one video converter that works on all three OSes, and is also very good that may just allow you to get away with not looking for others.

The converter in question is called HandBrake, and it's free and open-source. It supports most of the popular/mainstream video formats, and it has a series of interesting features that might also come in handy.

HandBrake supports MP4 and M4V, as well MKV. It features various video encoders as follows: H.265 (x265 and QuickSync), H.264(x264 and QuickSync), H.265 MPEG-4 and MPEG-2, VP8, VP9, and Theora.

In terms of supported audio encoders, HandBrake can handle AAC/HE-AAC, MP3, Flac, AC3 and Vorbis. The app also boasts support for various audio pass-thru(s) such as AC-3, E-AC3, DTS, DTS-HD, TrueHD, AAC and MP3 tracks.

HandBrake is not what one might call a minimalist video encoder/converter tool. Not to say that it's complicated to learn, but its GUI layout is not reminiscent of classic apps of this sort.

Other noteworthy features include the ability to work with subtitles (VobSub, Closed Captions CEA-608, and SRT), support for VFR and CFR, live static and video preview, title and chapter creator, as well as batch scan and queueing of encodes.

HandBrake also allows you to add a few effects to your converted videos with the help of filters such as Deinterlacing, Decomb, Denoise, Detelecine, Deblock, and Grayscale.

With its somewhat weird GUI, HandBrake might not seem like an attractive option at first. However, put in a bit of time to learn its features, and there's a good chance it will become your go-to audio converter on Linux.