Put Down That Cocktail! Handbrake 0.9.9 Final Ships [u]

Handbrake has good and, well, irritating news for Mac users. Yes, fans of the fairer platform gain improved Retina display support, a refreshed user interface (above) and other improvements. However, even newer high-end features — OpenCL 1.2 and Intel Quick Sync Video — aren’t available on the Mac.

• HandBrake 0.9.9 (download)

— Improved Retina display support

— Prevent sleep during encoding and scanning for Mountain Lion

— Drag & Drop files onto the Main window or application icon to scan

— Nicer progress indication on the dock icon

— Preview window improvements and bugfixes

— Updated Growl to 2.0.1, Notification Center support (when Growl is not installed)

— Blu-ray (PGS) subtitle support

— Additional video frame rates, including 30, 50, 59.94, 60 fps

— Double framerate (“bob”) mode for the deinterlace and decomb filters

— MORE (full release notes)

— Requires a 64-bit Intel Mac running 10.6 or later

That’s the good news. The irritating news is that Handbrake.fr has also released separate betas implementing OpenCL 1.2 and Intel’s Quick Sync Video, both are Windows only. Handbrake for Mac is NOT OpenCL compatible (see first comment below).

Sources of this irritation? Apple added Intel QSV support in OS X Mountain Lion (see below), though OpenCL 1.2 compatibility isn’t yet baked into OS X.