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Re:HandBrake 1.2.0 Released by cookiecaper on Sunday January 20, 2019 @01:17PM (#18954532)
I've always been a little unclear on the barriers between Handbrake and its dependencies. Does Handbrake maintain custom forks/patchsets that get applied to ffmpeg, etc.? I knew Handbrake as a GUI for ffmpeg, and in my research, I have come across one or two things that implied there was something unique about their backend that wasn't yet upstream, but ultimately not much else.

Since you're familiar with the project's development, would you mind clearing some of this ambiguity up for me? Thanks.

Re:HandBrake 1.2.0 Released by _Gyan_ on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:40AM (#18966226)
Handbrake applies about a dozen patches on top of the FFmpeg tree. See them at https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/tree/master/contrib/f...

Note that HB uses a release (4.1) rather than git master HEAD. So, some of those patches may get rescinded with new ffmpeg releases.

Also, it's best to think of ffmpeg as having two parts: the libraries (codec, format, ...) and the API controller which sets up the processing pipeline and manages its run i.e. parsing the commnad line, registering input/output streams, and executing the required operations. The latter for ffmpeg is in fftools/. Handbrake implements its own top-level controller.