Agent Orange wrote: The 8 hours it's taking to do a double sweep of a 3 hr movie into m4v is killing me. It would take maybe 45 minutes to do an avi.
They actually address your original question (along with most of the other major changes) on their homepage.
Quote: AVI: AVI is a rough beast. It is obsolete. It does not support modern container features like chapters, muxed-in subtitles, variable framerate video, or out of order frame display. Furthermore, HandBrake's AVI muxer is vanilla AVI 1.0 that doesn't even support large files. The code has not been actively maintained since 2005. Keeping it in the library while implementing new features means a very convoluted data pipeline, full of conditionals that make the code more difficult to read and maintain, and make output harder to predict. As such, it is now gone. It is not coming back, and good riddance.
Quote: I guess I should ask this question too. Is a 700mb .m4v comparable to a 700mb .avi?
The thing that was/is terrible about .avi is that it's not so much a real format as it is a wrapper-type envelope around other video formats. This is why you can download some .avi files that will play fine on a system that will not play others, and the only way to find out which is which is by trying to play them. So it makes this a hard question to answer accurately, because it kind of depends on what you were converting before and how good the quality of that was.
What they have to say about the new Handbrake makes it sound like the quality is supposed to be pretty darn good. How it compares to your other .avis, I don't know.
