HandBrake, the tool many people use to convert their DVDs to forms playable on other devices—including iPods, iPhones, Apple TVs, and on Macs via the QuickTime Player application—is being updated to convert not just DVDs and Video_TS folders, but many other kinds of video as well.

The new version, a 6.1 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and changes:

Universal input: HandBrake is no longer limited to DVDs: it will now accept practically any type of video as a source. This massive enhancement was achieved by tapping into the power of libavcodec and libavformat from the FFmpeg project.

Linux GUI: There is now an official GTK graphical interface for Linux, available as a binary for Ubuntu. This is the real deal, interacting directly with HandBrake's core library instead of just putting a pretty face on a command line interface. It has full feature parity with the Mac interface.

Video quality: The x264 project has really come into its own this year, and HandBrake 0.9.3 integrates the latest improvements to the H.264 encoding library. Picture quality has enhanced dramatically through the use of psychovisual rate distortion and adaptive quantization, and there have been significant speed optimizations.

Audio flexibility: HandBrake now offers total control over multiple audio tracks.

New, better organized presets (Be sure to run "Update Built-In Presets" from the Presets menu!): The presets are now "nested" in folders and have evolved. Notably, there is a new Apple "Universal" preset, designed to play and look good doing so on anything from an iPod Nano to an AppleTV.

Audio-video synchronization: HandBrake should now keep lip-synch as well as a DVD player can.

Multi-threaded deinterlacing: The "Slow" and "Slower" filters, as well as the new decomb filter, will now take advantage of as many processors as you can throw at them.

Theora video encoding: HandBrake now can encode video using the Theora codec.

Updated libraries: Besides x264, updated libraries include libsamplerate, libogg, xvidcore, libmpeg2, lame, faac, and ffmpeg's libavcodec, libavformat, and libswscale.

Note: HandBrake 0.9.3 requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later to install and run.