How to use HandBrake to optimize video for your phone
Sometimes you’ll find content that you want to play on your phone, but discover that it’s in an incompatible format.
Maybe it’s in an obsolete format like AVI. Maybe it’s HD video designed for playback on a PC with a good video card. Or maybe it’s just encoded at a bitrate too high to allow for smooth playback on mobile devices.
Better yet, maybe it’s something you made and want to show off on your phone, or even publish in Kinoma Guide for the world to see!
HandBrake
One solution is to use HandBrake, a popular open-source transcoding tool, to convert video to a mobile-friendly format.
Like our own Kinoma Producer 4, it can convert from many different formats. Unlike Kinoma Producer, HandBrake (1) doesn’t have the built-in “expert system” that makes it a no-brainer to convert media for reliable mobile playback, and (2) doesn’t come with Kinoma’s excellent customer support.
Compared to HandBrake, Kinoma Producer is “power brakes”. Still, HandBrake is a very good option if you’re up for a more manual process and some experimentation.
HandBrake presets
To get you started, we’ve created some presets for HandBrake for Windows that offer a good starting point for transcoding video for Kinoma Play. In many cases, you should be able to use these as-is.
- Kinoma Play — Widescreen — Use this for widescreen content like movies and HDTV.
- Kinoma Play — 4:3 — Use this for “narrowscreen” content with an aspect ratio of 4:3, like standard-definition content.
To use these presets with HandBrake for Windows:
- Download user-presets.zip and expand it to get the user_presets.xml file.
- Put the user_presets.xml file in your %APPDATA%HandBrake folder. (If you already have a user_presets.xml file you want to save, temporarily rename it to something like old_user_presets.xml before dropping in the new one.)
(Mac users: HandBrake presets are currently not cross-platform, although HandBrake contributors are working to fix that in a forthcoming release. When they do we’ll add universal presets to this post and announce it on Twitter.)
Enjoy! If you have feedback or questions, we welcome you to join us on our community forum.
AVi is not an obsolete format. It’s a commonly used and very convenient format for most of us. You could also say that mp3 is an obsolete format. But the best player is the player that can read ALL the formats, including the one that you consider as obsolete. No one would accept a player that cannot play MP3. So it’s the same for movie player that cannot play Avi.
MP3 is obviously not an obsolete format. (1) It’s in mainstream use (99%+ of digital music not sold by Apple is sold as MP3 files, 99%+ of audio podcasts are MP3 files), (2) it does a great job at what it was designed to do, and (3) it’s been actively updated over the years to support modern concepts like Unicode metadata.
AVI is obsolete because (1) it’s not in mainstream use (people who don’t download torrents will never see an AVI file), (2) it doesn’t support now-basic codec concepts (like B-frames) or content concepts (metadata, chapters, subtitles) except via hacks that aren’t widely supported, and (3) it’s been dead in the eyes of Microsoft, its creator, since the last century.
If you do ever run into an AVI file, it’ll be designed for PC playback in any case. So you’ll still want to run in through a transcoder (or use Orb to play it from your home PC, which will automatically transcode it as necessary) to convert it to a modern file format at a mobile-friendly frame size and bitrate.