Handbrake 0.10.1 Windows - Remove AAC (libavcodec)

[arcuser]

Handbrake 0.10.1 Windows

As title suggests, remove the AAC (libavcodec) entirely.

Having had reasonable experience in listening to AAC but no worthwhile experience in encoding with it, I opted for AAC (libavcodec) for a number of encodes as it is supposed to be the most widely compatible.

Little did I know that it was so atrocious and in fact the ouput would rival some of the poor MP3 encoders circa 10-15 years ago.

On first listening I initially put some of the compression down to the fact that I was lowering the bitrate (going down to 192kbps AAC libavcodec from 6 chan AC3 or DTS). But I later discovered serious flaws and really horrible compression issues on much closer listening.

I tried a number of kbps settings all the way up to the maximum, but all were awful.

Unbelievably, even encoding with MP3 produced a better (audible) result than using AAC (libavcodec).

(My only reasons for switching to AAC were purely to achieve more channels with a smaller filesize).


I am now left in the position of having to re-encode the sound using a better codec and mux it back into a rather large number of videos.



Hence as per topic, libavcodec is so poor, I really do not see it's purpose and where it fits into Handbrake.

And even if you reject this topic, hopefully it will be here as a warning for other users considering this awful AAC codec. Just don't PERIOD

[Deleted User 11865]

We also had the unfortunate idea of making it default, simply because the other AAC encoder is so slow it can bottleneck the encode if you use fast-ish video encoding settings.

We won't be removing it, but hopefully it'll improve eventually (someone is working on it, but last I checked his patch was nowhere near ready for merge, regrettably).

[Deleted User 13735]

Although some are critiquing its limitations, I quite like fdk for web delivery and encodes from movies.

My laptops are too slow for anything but the CPU to be a bottleneck, and given the issues of licensing and even finding a decent aac encoder, I feel thankful we have fdk-aac.

Its always hard for newcomers to have an understanding of what led up to the current state of circumstances; that's why I recommend SEARCHING for background and history before posting a new topic.

[Djfe]

FDK AAC is way superior to libav, but it should be left in, for faster encoding, it will improve eventually like musicvid already said

one reason why aac is important to me for example is in fact compatibility
it's not like ac3 and other dolby codecs are unsupported but they demand horrendous prices from developers for their licenses, so you barely find AC3 support in mobile apps (because apps are way cheaper than PC software)

even VLC was forced by Apple and Dolby to leave AC3 support out on ios
it's almost the same on android

there are ways to get around it: MX Player offers a custom codec on xda that contains ac3 decoders
but you cannot do that on iOS obviously

using your PC to transcode in real-time also isn't the choice for everyone and would make a Handbrake encode useless to some
(PS3 Media Server)