HandBrake decodes your video. sometimes nothing needs decoding.
updated · by Anton Shakirov
HandBrake is free, open source and the reference video transcoder — the deepest control over codecs, filters and encoder settings you can get without a command line. it is also, by its own description, a transcoder: it decodes your video and encodes it again. that is the right tool for a great many jobs, and the wrong one for the job people most often open it to do.
if you are changing the codec, the bitrate or the resolution, HandBrake is built for exactly that and nothing here substitutes for it. this page is for the person whose mkv already holds h.264 that their Mac plays fine — where the file needs a different box, not a different picture.
what HandBrake is built for
transcoding with control. AV1, H.265, H.264, MPEG-4, MPEG-2, VP8 and VP9 on the encoder side, constant quality against average bitrate, two-pass encoding, hardware acceleration, and a queue that will chew through a folder overnight.
the price of that control is a window full of settings and a first hour spent learning what they mean. that is a fair trade when the settings are the point. it is a strange trade when you only wanted the file to open.
the class of tool, rather than this one product, is covered separately: the Mac file converter page
what HandBrake will not do: change the container
is remuxing the same as converting?
no, and the difference is the whole of this page. a video file is a box with tracks inside it: mkv, mp4 and mov are boxes; h.264, h.265 and aac are what sits in them. moving tracks from one box to another without touching them is called a remux, and it copies bytes — no decoding, no encoding, no decision about quality, because no picture is ever rebuilt.
transcoding is the other thing: unpack the picture, rebuild it, put the rebuild in a box. it takes real time and always costs a little quality, because the picture is being described again from a description.
why does HandBrake take an hour for this?
because it has no video passthrough. it will pass an audio track through untouched — AC-3, DTS-HD, TrueHD, FLAC and the rest are copied across as they are — but the video track is always decoded and encoded again. feed it an mkv holding h.264 and ask for an mp4, and it will spend an hour rebuilding a picture that was already exactly right, then hand you a file slightly worse than the one you started with.
this is not an oversight anyone forgot to fix. the project decided it on purpose and has said so plainly.
asked directly for video passthrough, the maintainer answered that the decision had been made not to add it and to keep HandBrake on a narrow core path, pointing people who need a plain copy at ffmpeg, MkvMerge or Subler instead: HandBrake discussion #3343
read that as a scope, not a shortcoming. HandBrake is a transcoder that declines to be a repacker. the mistake is at the other end — ours, for reaching for it.
what your Mac does on its own, and where it stops
macOS ships a remuxer already
`/usr/bin/avconvert` is part of the system and has a preset called PresetPassthrough, which copies tracks instead of re-encoding them. on macOS 26.6.2 it turned an 82 MB mov into an mp4 in two seconds, and the container brand changed from `ftypqt` to `ftypmp42` — a real repack, not a renamed file. so for mov and mp4 you need nothing at all, and that case is closed before this page starts.
the mov case is written out step by step, with the exact command: convert mov to mp4 on a Mac
the containers it will not read
hand the same command an mkv or a webm and it answers `unable to read`. AVFoundation does not know those boxes: an mkv rebuilt from a working mp4, same h.264 and same aac inside, fails with error −11828, while the mp4 with identical content opens fine. the codec was never the problem — the wrapper is.
that is the honest shape of the gap. not «macOS cannot convert video» — it can, quickly, for free. it simply cannot open two containers, and those two are the ones the internet hands you.
the list of containers AVFoundation will open is published, and Matroska is not on it: AVURLAsset.audiovisualTypes()
why the file plays in VLC and not in QuickTime, in full: open an mkv file on a Mac
so which of the two do you need
ask one question about the file: does the picture have to change?
if the answer is yes — smaller bitrate, different codec, lower resolution, deinterlacing, burnt-in subtitles — the picture is being rebuilt either way, and HandBrake rebuilds it better than anything else here. use it, and stop reading.
if the answer is no, and you only need the file in a box your Mac will open, then any tool that decodes is the wrong tool by definition. the simple case ends the moment the picture itself needs work.
how hop changes the container
hop repacks mkv and webm into mp4 with the picture copied across untouched, then converts video, images, audio and documents for the ordinary cases where the picture does have to change. it has no codec-level control at all, and it is free and open source, MIT.
| what you have | the free route | with hop |
|---|---|---|
| an mkv, and you want h.265 at half the bitrate | HandBrake — this is what it is for | not needed, use HandBrake |
| an mkv holding h.264 that will not open | ffmpeg -c copy, once you know the flag exists | drop it in, out comes an mp4 |
| a mov to hand to something strict | avconvert -p PresetPassthrough, two seconds | same result, no command |
| a clip that must fit under an upload limit | convert, measure, adjust, repeat | the size is shown before you commit |
| a folder of clips for one destination | look up the recommended dimensions, then script it | one button per destination |
| images, audio and documents in the same batch | a different tool for each kind | one window |
the first two rows are honest about the free route: ffmpeg's stream copy does the identical repack, costs nothing, and is documented plainly: ffmpeg stream copy
the size you were promised is the size you get
when the picture does have to change, most converters ask you to pick a quality level and let you find out afterwards what it cost. hop runs a sample through first and shows the resulting size before you commit, so «make this small enough to send» stops being a guessing loop. originals are never touched: the result lands next to them as a copy.
video for the place it is going
vertical for reels and shorts, square for a feed, wide for YouTube. one button sets the frame, the resolution and the compression together and names the bitrate it means, so you are not looking up recommended dimensions again. a picture of the wrong shape is cropped, given bars, or laid over a blurred copy of itself — never stretched.
the destination presets, with what each platform actually wants: compress video for reels and shorts
if you are weighing paid converters rather than HandBrake, the comparison is next door: a Permute alternative
where HandBrake is the better tool
everything above is one narrow claim: for changing a box, a transcoder is the wrong shape. that claim says nothing against HandBrake anywhere else, and almost everywhere else it wins outright.
control hop does not have at all
codec choice across AV1, H.265, H.264, MPEG-4, MPEG-2, VP8 and VP9. constant quality against average bitrate. two-pass encoding. hardware acceleration when the drivers are there. hop has none of this and no plan to: there is no CRF field, no encoder preset, no bitrate box. if any of that is why you opened HandBrake, this does not replace it and will not pretend to.
filters, subtitles and chapters
deinterlacing, decomb, denoise, detelecine, deblock, grayscale and colourspace work — the things that fix old footage rather than shrink new footage. subtitles in VobSub, CEA-608 closed captions, SSA and SRT, kept as tracks or burnt in. chapter markers carried through. audio pass-thru for AC-3, E-AC3, FLAC, DTS, DTS-HD, TrueHD, AAC, Opus, MP3 and MP2. hop does none of these.
the full list is on the project's own features page. check it before you decide you have outgrown HandBrake — most people who think they have only ever used the default preset: HandBrake features
presets by device, not by destination
hop knows where a clip is being posted. HandBrake knows what will play it: shipped presets for Apple devices, Android, Amazon Fire, Chromecast, PlayStation, Roku and Xbox, plus web, Matroska, hardware and production-grade categories. if the target is a television or a console rather than a feed, that library is the answer and we have nothing like it.
the preset categories and the device families each one covers: HandBrake official presets
open, and still shipping
HandBrake is GPLv2, built by volunteers, cross-platform, and still releasing — 1.11.2 came out in March 2026. it has outlived most of the paid converters that have advertised against it over the years. free forever, with no version that costs money and nothing held back.
it has one shortcoming for one job, and it announced that shortcoming itself. everywhere else it is better than what we make.
nothing is uploaded either way
both convert on your Mac. that is worth stating because the common alternative is an online converter, where a contract or a family video goes to a stranger's temporary folder in exchange for convenience — and where a two-hour film is a non-starter before privacy even comes up.
hop works with the Wi-Fi off, and so does HandBrake. neither has anything to gain from your files.
the same logic applied to photos rather than video: convert heic to jpg on a Mac
frequently asked questions
- can HandBrake convert mkv to mp4 without re-encoding?
- no. HandBrake passes audio tracks through untouched but always decodes and encodes the video, so even an mkv that already holds h.264 is rebuilt from scratch. the project has said this is deliberate rather than missing.
- why does HandBrake take so long for a simple conversion?
- because there is no simple conversion in it — every job is a full re-encode. a remux copies the tracks across and finishes in seconds; a transcode rebuilds every frame, and an hour for a feature-length file is normal.
- will i lose quality changing mkv to mp4?
- not if it is a remux — nothing is decoded, so nothing is lost. you lose a little quality only when the picture is re-encoded, which is what HandBrake does to every file it touches.
- why will mkv not play on my Mac?
- macOS does not read the container. the same h.264 and aac play fine as an mp4 and fail as an mkv — the built-in avconvert answers «unable to read», and AVFoundation returns error −11828. hop repacks it into mp4 with the picture copied across untouched.
- can i choose the codec in hop?
- no. hop has no codec-level settings — no CRF, no two-pass, no encoder choice. that is what HandBrake is built around, and if you need it, HandBrake is the answer.
- does it convert images and documents too?
- yes — images, audio, and documents including Pages, Numbers and Keynote out as pdf, docx, xlsx or pptx. HandBrake is video only, by design.
- does anything get uploaded?
- no. everything happens on your Mac and works with no connection at all, in both apps.
the hop side of this
file converter — images, video, audio and documents. offline, with the size shown up front.
about the author
Anton Shakirovmakes hop
makes hop and every page on this site. eighteen tools under a single menu bar icon, MIT licensed and open source. reads and answers issues and email himself.