// the take
A set of three standalone Ruby command-line scripts that wrap HandBrakeCLI and FFmpeg to transcode, crop-detect, and convert video files, aimed at people ripping Blu-rays and DVDs into smaller H.264/HEVC/AV1 files for storage or playback on other devices.
The default bitrate and crop settings for 1080p/720p/480p are tuned from actual use rather than left at HandBrakeCLI defaults, so you get decent output without reading HandBrake's docs first. It supports a real spread of encoder backends (x264, x265_10bit, SVT-AV1, and Nvidia NVENC variants) with automatic HDR10/HDR10+/Dolby Vision handling baked into each mode. The --extra/-x flag passes arguments straight through to the underlying HandBrakeCLI API, so the small built-in option set doesn't actually limit what you can do.
It has a hard runtime dependency on HandBrakeCLI, ffmpeg, and ffprobe being separately installed and on PATH — nothing is bundled, and Windows setup involves manual binary installs or WSL rather than a real installer. The early-2025 rewrite broke compatibility with the old gem-based version entirely, so anyone still on the previous release has to relearn the CLI rather than upgrade in place. There's a single maintainer and no CI or test suite visible in the repo, so bug fixes and encoder-compatibility updates depend entirely on one person's availability. It also has no batch queue or job management of its own — processing a whole library means wrapping the script in your own shell loop and handling retries yourself.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →