Drag And Drop Conversion Of Videos With Handbrake Using DropFolders
Video conversion is something that almost all of us have tried our hand at, one point or the other. Whether it is to make a video DVD Player-compatible, or to convert it so our portable media devices, aka smartphones and tablets, can handle the playback, almost everyone would’ve converted videos at least once. These days, choices among conversion software, especially the free ones, are numerous. One can arguably claim that Handbrake is one of the best free video encoding/decoding tools available out there. While the program itself has evolved quite a lot in terms of user friendliness and ease of understanding, wouldn’t it still be convenient if every single part of the process can be automated? Well, it seems developer Joseph Labrecque certainly thought so, so he created DropFolders.
DropFolders is an Adobe Air based program that serves as merely an external interface to Handbrake. The program has no coding engine of its own, and it uses Handbrake to perform all video conversion tasks. However, what makes it unique is its ability to monitor folders, and any video file dropped into a monitored folder will be converted using Handbrake based on a preset criteria.
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Using this application is really simple. DropFolders works with presets, so to begin with, you’ll need to create atleast one preset. Define the name, input and output folders and the handbrake arguments that you want to use for the conversion process. Since this is something many users are unfamiliar with, the developer has included three presets for quick conversion.
With everything in place, the software is good to go. As soon as you put a file in your Watch folder, DropFolders will fire up Handbrake and conversion based on the preset selected for that particular folder will begin. It is possible to watch multiple folders with different settings via different presets.
In order to make the watched usage possible without the need for launching the application manually every time, DropFolders can also be configured as a service and deployed in a server environment using Microsoft Windows Server Resource Kit SRVANY.EXE. It comes bundled with Handbrake.
If you still facing difficulty in setting it up, watch the walkthrough video below, created by the developer.
The application is Windows only for now, but the developer is working on an OS X version. It requires Adobe Air 2.0 and Handbrake, and works with Windows 7 32-bit OS. Testing was carried out using Windows 7 Ultimate, 32-bit edition.
He mentions getting the handbrake arguments from the handbrake GUI (v0.9.6), but I can’t see where on GUI you can find these things. It seems you have to understand the argument code in the first place in order to know which areas in the code to change. I don’t know handbrake code that well, so this is useless to me until there is a user GUI in DropFolders that I can change settings with.
It works, but far too clunky to be used. It’s either this or manually add to queue in handbrake. Think i will stick to using the add to queue until the personal preferences are fixed