HandBrake Icon

Thanks to HandBrake, we can easily convert digital videos for viewing on the Nexus One for free. HandBrake is an open source (read “free”) application that can be used to encode most videos  in x264 format for playback on the Nexus One. There is also the feature of queuing up multiple videos for conversion with each of their own independent conversion attributes and HandBrake can perform the conversion in a batch while you go and sleep or do something else away from your computer.

I must add that watching movies/TV shows on the Nexus One’s AMOLED display is amazing. The black parts of the videos are truly black and the colours are very vibrant. I am already wishing for an AMOLED monitor and TV and these will come at a huge cost when they become available in the future I believe.

The interface of the application is quite easy to understand and the tool tips should help you when you need more guidance. You can download and install the application from http://handbrake.fr. For the uninitiated, you will need to download the GUI (read “graphical user interface”) version instead of the CLI (read “command line interface”) ones.

As of this writing, the version I have is 0.9.4. I will provide you with the simplest method here and leave you to figure out what you can and cannot do yourself.

First, you should know that .m4v and .mp4 file extensions can be used interchangeably. The Gallery application in Nexus One will only read videos with .mp4 extension so just rename the output with a .mp4 extension if it was .m4v. You can also enter Tools > Options and uncheck Always use iPod/iTunes friendly file extension (.m4v) for MP4 as shown in Figure 1. You will only need to do this once and subsequent MP4 encodes should produce  files with .mp4 extensions automatically.

Figure 1: HandBrake option to use .mp4 extension for outputs instead of .m4v

Using the iPhone & iPod Touch preset selected from the panel on the right as shown in Figure 2, we can have the basis of the encode settings for use on Nexus One. Make sure the Container is set to MP4 File. The options that are grayed out in Figure 2 will be available once a video file has been selected for encoding. Adjust the width/height of the output video as large as possible such that neither exceeds the screen resolution of the Nexus One (width: 800, height: 480). Keep Aspect Ratio should be checked during that process. If the Aspect Ratio is not 1.77, you may want to crop the video manually, or just make do with black bars on both sides of the video.

Figure 2: HandBrake GUI encode options

Moving on to the Video tab as shown in Figure 3, you will see options for compression of the video. Note the slider under the Constant Quality option. This allows the user to increase/decrease the quality of the resulting video  and HandBrake will automatically adjust the file size to cater to for the option. The default 60.78% produces what I feel is more than adequate. Increasing this value a little will increase the resulting file size by a lot. In the event you need to control the size of the output video instead of the quality, use Target Size or Avg Bitrate instead. Read more on these options here if you really want to tweak them.

Figure 3: HandBrake GUI encode options

On the Audio tab, make sure the Bitrate is not set higher than 160 for AAC according to Nexus One’s specifications. You can then click Start to begin encoding the video or Add to Queue to prepare a set of videos for encoding as highlighted in Figure 4.

Figure 4: HandBrake GUI encode options

Note: Do not close the command window (the black window with white text in Windows) which appears when you start your video encoding. That will abort the encode process.

Official website: http://handbrake.fr and user guide