HandBrake 1.11 adds ProRes, DNxHR encoders and MOV output

www.omgubuntu.co.uk

HandBrake, the free and open-source video transcoder, has just dropped its first major release of 2026 – adding new professional encoders, MOV output container and a considered clutch of Linux changes.

Those of you who work to production standards will find the DNxHR and ProRes encoder support in HandBrake 1.11.0 the star addition. Both offer a range of presets, including standard, high-quality, and proxy variants at resolutions up to 4K.

The new ProRes and DNxHR encoders, listed as “Production ProRes” and “Production DNxHR”, can output in a MOV container, new with this release.

ProRes is most associated with Apple and, per Wikipedia, “is widely used as a final format delivery method for HD broadcast files in commercials, features, Blu-ray and streaming”. It works in HandBrake using FFmpeg’s ProRes encoder, part of libavcodec.

AV1 AMD Encoder

[

An alternative choice

Aviator: Fast, No-Fuss AV1 Video Encoder

](https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/08/aviator-svt-av1-video-encoder-app-for-linux)

AV1 is a royalty-free video codec popular for creating high resolution, bandwidth efficient video used in streaming and archiving.

HandBrake 1.11 adds a new AMD VCN AV1 10-bit encoder with a 4K preset that works with AMD 9000 series GPUs and newer.

Got an older 7000 series AMD GPU?

The AMD VCN AV1 encoder in HandBrake will run on it too, but the release notes say output dimensions may be off due to a hardware limitation that devs can’t address in software.

Expanded archival presets

An important change, albeit one most of us will not make use of, sees the Preservation FFV1 presets extended. FFV1 is a lossless codec used by institutions like the Library of Congress for digitising and preserving video collections. Think old VHS tapes and film reels.

As new FLAC and PCM preset variants are included, archivists get more choice in how audio is stored alongside the video: FLAC for lossless compressed, PCM for fully uncompressed. FFV1 can also now be muxed into MP4 as well as the more commonly used Matroska (MKV).

Linux changes

If you run HandBrake as a Flatpak on Linux then opening a transcoded file hands off to your default apps properly via the sandbox portal handlers. If you’ve got VLC set as your video player, this change means it will actually open in VLC rather than silently failing.

There are also new buttons on the summary page to let you step through preview frames, improved file size display, a fix for disk space checks and you can now set HandBrake’s UI to use a different language than the rest of your system.

Other changes

As with any major release, there’s a fresh set of library updates: FFmpeg jumps to v8.0.1, AV1 decoding library libdav1d is bumped to v1.5.3 and HandBrake’s AV1 software encoder SVT-AV1 hits v4.0.1.

Windows users should be aware that this release drops .NET 8 in favour of .NET Desktop Runtime 10.0.x. If HandBrake stops launching after the update has been downloaded and applied, that’s (probably) why.

On macOS, there are a variety of “minor miscellaneous fixes”, plus notification sounds when HandBrake is in the foreground, while lengthy file name labels in the queue area now truncate in the middle, rather than the end, so you can see beginning and end of file names.

Installing HandBrake 1.11.0 on Ubuntu

HandBrake is free, open-source software available for Linux, macOS and Windows, available to download via the official website or from the project’s GitHub.

On Ubuntu, the easiest way to install the latest stable release of HandBrake is from Flathub – an official, verified package, it receives new releases automatically (though it often takes several days from announcement to upload).

If you search for HandBrake in Ubuntu’s App Center it will suggest an unofficial snap. Avoid it; it’s not been updated since 2019. For the best performance and to benefit from the latest features and encoder support, use an official build.