Great and selfless work without reward but with a curious little quirk of note

HandBrake for Windows support
Forum rules
An Activity Log is required for support requests. Please read How-to get an activity log? for details on how and why this should be provided.
Post Reply
LoneAscendant
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Dec 05, 2022 5:20 am

Great and selfless work without reward but with a curious little quirk of note

Post by LoneAscendant »

I love handbrake and have been using the program for maybe as long as 3 years now. It's amazing, and development is selfless, and thankless. You just download and go. Maybe I can donate.

But I would like to comment on one tiny minor detail.

Why on earth is the default conversion suffix set to .m4v????

All the videos I ran though handbrake were this strange .m4v

I knew it was mp4 and I didn't dig through the settings until today.

There's a switch that can be set so the encode will be .mp4

That would be, like, normal.

But after using it for so long, being weirded out by the .m4v suffix I finally at last reviewed every single setting and found that encodes could be set to simple .mp4, as the actual suffix and encoding denotes.

I have too many .m4v files sitting around that aren't recognized by my Android TV box.

Why on earth would you choose .m4v as the suffix as the default???

It's .mp4 and I finally switched it over!!! But I had to get wise and dig for something that should have been obvious from the start.

Just weird. Plain weird. I duly appreciate your thankless work, but why on earth you don't set .mp4 as the default suffix I can't quite comprehend.

For the love of god, change the default to .mp4 so more people don't have to remain confused when using your excellent program.

I spent years converting a video here and there with .m4v popping up and ending up confused and tangled.

It's just a setting, for MP4 format. Why on earth would you use .m4v as the default???

It caused me frustration and confusion to no end since the very first install.

I dunno what to say to you??? Change the default setting??? Please???

Thanks for the program, but seriously, why .m4v???

That has cause me a world of hurt.

Thanks,
Trevor
Woodstock
Veteran User
Posts: 4613
Joined: Tue Aug 27, 2013 6:39 am

Re: Great and selfless work without reward but with a curious little quirk of note

Post by Woodstock »

If you install it "fresh" now, it will default to ".mp4". But you've run it from when the default was ".m4v", and it retains your existing settings nowadays. It's a compatibility thing.

It "used to be" that you had to have .m4v to enable the advanced settings when operating on an Apple machine. That's changed. But for some of us, .m4v still enables things that .mp4 does not.
Post Reply