Handbrake video encoding software running under Xubuntu Linux

Lessons learned encoding media under linux

Hardware and Linux Distribution Differences This post covers a bunch of areas of media decoding and encoding that I’ve discovered over a number of years using Debian-based distributions like Xubuntu, and Linux Mint. Primarily I’ll cover some of the differences between Xubuntu and Linux Mint, how various hardware (CPUs and graphics cards) encode video, and some of the “gotchas” when it comes to different methods as they apply to Handbrake (software) and MakeMKV. ...

January 23, 2025 · 8 min
Core usage encoding Blu-Ray quality files

Handbrake performance on more than 6 cores

Diminishing returns after 6 cores, but not for all media Handbrake is a video transcoder. It’s normally used to convert and compress video from a format into a more compressed format. Handbrake comes in a command line version, handbrake-cli, and a graphical version, handbrake. I’ve seen it mentioned several times that Handbrake is best at 6 cores or less, after that the encoding returns are diminishing. I thought this was the case with some of my experimentation, but it seems the answer is more complicated – it depends. ...

March 20, 2023 · 3 min