Picture Settings

The picture settings tab is located on HandBrake’s main window and becomes active after you’ve scanned a source.

Picture settings tab

It is recommended that you start with a preset that most closely fits your requirements. After this, if you want to set a limit on the output resolution, simply set the “Resolution Limit” dropdown to the desired value and HandBrake will automatically take care of the rest.

Cropping

HandBrake by default will try and detect and crop black bars from the video. Encoding black bars increases the encode time and the amount of disk space required, so it’s best to let HandBrake remove them.

HandBrake’s auto-crop is not perfect. It’s giving you a best guess at what the crop values should be. If you find it gets it wrong, which is not that common, you can adjust them by selecting the “Custom” option.

You can preview the effect of your adjustments by clicking the “Preview” button on the toolbar.

HandBrake toolbar

The preview window will then appear and will display in real-time any changes you make on the picture settings screen. If the size of the output exceeds the window size, the preview window will scale it to fit to screen.

Preview window

Upscaling Video

While upscaling is NOT recommended, there are some instances where it is useful (i.e. uploading to YouTube). To enable this, check the “Allow upscaling” checkbox.

The “Resolution Limit” will still be honoured in this case.

Anamorphic

Typically recommended that you leave this on “automatic”. If your source is not anamorphic, having this set to an anamorphic option will not affect the output. Thus, it is safe to leave on.

When “Automatic” is selected, HandBrake will maximise the output size of the video, up to the source resolution or set “Resolution Limit”.

When “Off” is selected along with unchecking “Optimal Size”, you can alter both “width” and “height”. Otherwise, the source size, or resolution limit will be used.

When “Custom” is selected, you have full control of the output dimensions.