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HandBrake is a popular free and open source video transcoder available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The tool works great however, the app widgets are black under Unity, this issue being caused by Ubuntu's overlay scrollbars:

HandBrake Unity overlay scrollbars black bug

If you're using Unity, you can add +Marc Deslauriers' HandBrake PPA, which provides a fix for this black widgets bug. The HandBrake packages in this PPA also ship with Unity Launcher progress bar integration, so you can quickly see the transcoding progress without having the app on top:

HandBrake Unity patches

For those who aren't familiar with HandBrake, here's a quick list of features:
  • for input sources, HandBrake supports most common multimedia files and any DVD or BluRay sources that do not contain any kind of copy protection;
  • supported outputs:
    • file containers: MP4 (M4V) and MKV;
    • video encoders: H.264 (x264), H.265 (x265) MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 (libav), VP8 (libvpx) and Theora (libtheora);
    • audio encoders: AAC,, MP3, Flac, AC3 and Vorbis;
  • device presets;
  • title / chapter selection;
  • chapter markers;
  • queue up multiple encoding jobs;
  • subtitles support (VobSub, Closed Captions CEA-608, SSA, SRT);
  • constant quality or average bitrate video encoding;
  • video filters: deinterlacing, decomb, denoise, detelecine, deblock, grayscale, cropping and scaling;
  • live video preview;
  • comes with graphical and command line interfaces.


Install HandBrake with Unity patches in Ubuntu 15.04, 14.10 and 14.04


To add Marc Deslauriers' HandBrake PPA and install HandBrake with Unity patches (fixed black widgets and Unity Launcher progress bar integration) in Ubuntu 15.04, 14.10 or 14.04, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mdeslaur/handbrake
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install handbrake

For other Linux distributions, Windows and Mac OS X, see the HandBrake downloads page.

via G+