How To Get HB With FDK-AAC + x265 v2.6 (Windows)

[kurtunderhay]

On the subject of AAC-FDK - has anybody done any testing of AAC (avcodec) vs AAC (FDK) vs FLAC in 10.0.1?
I'm curious about a couple of things:
1. When FDK was first removed, the development team indicated that their intention was to improve the quality of the remaining AAC encoder. Does anybody know whether this has happened?
2. If quality of AAC (avcodec) is now improved, and/or if FLAC is of comparable/better quality without hugely increased filesize, is it still worth having to maintain a custom build to retain FDK as an option?

Interested to know whether anybody has already done their own tests and willing to share results / views.

[mduell]

1. LOL no, that was just to placate people. See complaint after complaint here and in the subreddit about the lousy AAC audio quality.

2. FLAC is so much larger than any reasonable AAC bitrate it's not a realistic comparison.

[Deleted User 11865]

Well, no technically FFmpeg did improve their encoder to the point where it should be usable. But (AFAIK) libav didn't merge those changes, and we haven't had time to submit patches for that either.

[WhatZit]

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=34953&p=163970#p163970

Updated (and tested) for HandBrake v1.0.3+, and x265 v2.3.

[andrewk89]

This isn't for the feint of heart, but not too difficult, either. Computer is Windows 10 x64. I installed VirtualBox and an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS guest. Directions for HB 1.0.7 worked great. I used all the defaults for VirtualBox and Ubuntu. 1GB RAM and 10 GB storage was barely enough. When I was done, Ubuntu complained that I had only 250 MB storage left. I'm pretty sure Ubuntu was swapping like mad because "10-20 minutes" was more like an hour. But ...

Great directions! Transcoded a video with 1.0.7 using FDK (HE-AAC) and worked great.

Lessons learned:

• Handbrake folder ended up using ~4.5 GB. Should have given Ubuntu 15GB storage.
• Should have given Ubuntu 2GB RAM.
• Ubuntu Unity interface is a pig. Took way to long to find the terminal. Thank god Canonical is giving up on it. Kubuntu would have been a better choice to use (KDE desktop - behaves more like Windows).
• getting hb.dll out of Ubuntu took way too long. Didn't know you had to install the guest additions. Then File Manager said I didn't have permission to open the shared folder in /media. Ended up having to manually mount the Windows folder.

Thanks.

[dbamp]

FYI, I successfully compiled following the above instructions using the Bash on Windows Subsystem for Linux instead of a virtual machine!

[gio]

FYI, I successfully compiled following the above instructions using the Bash on Windows Subsystem for Linux instead of a virtual machine!

Same!

Thanks for the guides!

[naisren]

I successfully compiled, FDK and QSV works like a charm!
Thanks a lot!!!

[swegn]

I'm afraid I'm too much of a novice to attempt the Ubuntu compilation, but really glad to know this is working well for folks!

[WhatZit]

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=34953#p163970

Updated (and tested) for HandBrake v1.0.7+, and x265 v2.5.

You might be interested...

Compiling x265 v2.4 stable into HandBrake had caused no trouble, yet including v2.5 stable consistently built a mysteriously non-functioning library that crashed HandBrake:
https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/pull/826

It turned out that MulticoreWare had introduced a logic bomb in v2.5 that forced HandBrake's MinGW build system to exclude almost all of the encoder's functions, something that didn't afflict other build systems like Virtual Studio:
https://bitbucket.org/multicoreware/x26 ... ffmpeg-24x

It took a while to figure this out.

The point is that whilst any stand-alone upstream project may be able to successfully bump their versions, there is no guarantee that downstream projects which depend on them can inherit that success.

Typically, time heals all program code - the key part of that being TIME!

[Daz]

Thanks for this guide, had been putting of updateing since FDK-AAC had to be removed because avcodec isn't fit for purpose but this got me back in the game and was really easy thanks to your guide. Thank You and thanks to the HB devs for their continued work.

[WhatZit]

EDIT: Superceded by new information here: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=34953#p163970

Updated and tested for x265 v2.6, and the new integration of high-bit libraries (e.g 10/12 bit support is now built-in, so no more downloading additional files).