When comparing HandBrake vs KDENlive, the Slant community recommends KDENlive for most people. In the question“What are the best video encoding tools?” KDENlive is ranked 1st while HandBrake is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose KDENlive is:
Kdenlive is licensed under GPLv2, and built on top of other open source projects like FFmpeg.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great, easy to use presets
There are presets for everything, so you don't have to delve deep in to advanced features if you don't want or need to. And in most cases you won't have to because the presets are great.
Pro Advanced features
Although HandBrake is pretty straightforward to use, you can adjust pretty much any aspect of your conversion if necessary. For example, when transcoding video you have the option of adjusting between constant and variable framerate, adjusting average bitrate and constant quality, having 2-pass encoding or not, as well as tinkering with encoder specific options, and many, many, many more options.
Pro Fast
Since version 0.9.9. HandBrake has been very fast.
Pro Wide range of formats and multiple media types supported
HandBrake can handle DVDs, Blu-Rays, .mp4, .mkv, H.264(x264), MPEG-4, MPEG-2, AAC, MP3, FLAC, AC3, Vorbis, AC-3, DTS and DTS-HD among others.
Pro Often works when dumping archiving disc to hard drive methods do not
Pro Free and open source
HandBrake is licensed under GPL.
Pro Cross-platform
HandBrake works on Windows, Linux and OS X.
Pro Lightweight
It is designed to convert, no added bloat.
Pro Good metadata support
HandBrake can pull, use and edit metadata.
Pro Command Line Interface option
There's HandBrakeCLI if you wish to use HandBrake frome a terminal.
Pro Encoding options are comprehensive but easy to use up front
The GUI makes it easy to encode by providing profiles and a simple GUI, but offers extensive encoding options for people willing to learn and spend time experimenting.
Pro Open Source
Kdenlive is licensed under GPLv2, and built on top of other open source projects like FFmpeg.
Pro Works great as an audio editor
Audio is edited in the same way as video, which makes it one of the best audio editors.
Pro Surpisingly complete
Although this editor is not up with the top of the professional pack of editors, it certainly packs a powerful punch, and should provide enough features for amateur montages, ranging from alpha manipulation, to multiple audio and video live track editing.
Pro Its great for learn the basics of video-editing
Pro Subtitles included
Cons
Con Supports only two containers
You can output only .mp4 and .mkv.
Con There is no way to preserve menus and special features
Menus and special features will typically not be included in the output from a handbrake encode. Third party software would need to be used.
Con no linux support for hw acceleration
I know that it is not as high quality, but transcoding terabytes of 1080p videos to h265 without hw support isn't realistic and wont be for a long time
Con Not for 1:1 archiving or true backup use
Most uses of Handbrake are lossy, lossless is possible but it usually entails crazy huge file sizes.
Con It's laggy and freezes, with some chance of crashing
Con Timeline cursor is not working
Timeline cursor is not working well on Kubuntu, very difficult to use it. You have to switch all the time between project monitor and clip monitor to get it work.
Con Dose not work well in Windows
They do not support windows well like other distribution. You will face a lot of problems.
Con No hardware acceleration
If you don't have a CPU that's good for video encoding, the render time can be quite bad.
Con Does not have good distribution channel
You have to go to their website to get newest version, does not auto update via package manager.
Con Doesn't support multi frame-rate video editing
When you choose the mixed frame rate option, your video with 60 fps will be broken (slow down and trimmed).
(This con might be just misunderstanding of how to do video editing and production from the user who typed in).