Monday, February 27, 2012

Using Handbrake to re-encode Hi10P content

Tokumei Sentai Gobusters premiered this week, and was picked up by Over-time for subbing. As they have with Kamen Rider Fourze they're using h.264 10-bit encoding to produce smaller file sizes with equivalent or better picture quality over the more traditional 8-bit methods. If you want a technical explanation of this you can find it elsewhere. Bottom line is you save space without sacrificing quality. The downside is that you need recent video codecs and a strong enough cpu to decode everything in software.

There is currently no hardware support for Hi10P content. That means if you're like me and use a dedicated HTPC (I have a Zotac Mag HD, with a little atom processor), you are unable to watch such content even with the latest codecs, as you're machine just isn't strong enough. Don't worry it's possible and simple to transcode the content to something with HW acceleration support, and I'm going to show you how.