This is only one of a number of changes. HandBrake's capabilities are no longer restricted to converting DVDs, but thanks to Ffmpeg, support is available for almost any video format.

While the QT interface is already available in the source code, the developers appear to be still working on it. The official announcement mentions only the new GTK interface, not to be mistaken for Rippedwire. The mono GUI serves solely the keyboard console commands, and as such, is a wrapper for the CLI version. In comparison, the GTK-GUI communicates directly with the software's core library. Rippedwire is a copy of the Windows surface, which the developers say is quite flawed.

New is also the integration of the H.264 codec from the X264 Project. Developers are promising a dramatic improvement in picture quality due to the use of "psychovisual rate distortion" -- a technique that works against loss of sharpness in frames and so increases detail, and the utilization of adaptive quantization.

HandBrake can now handle multiple audio tracks, the decoding of CSS protected DVDs has been simplified and queuing does no longer cause a crash. Sensible pre-settings are also provided, one of which, called "Apple", enables HandBrake to generate software films for the iPod and Apple TV.
The software is available to download on the project website. The 32 bit version with GTK-GUI is 9.4 MByte large and comes in a Debian package. A 64 bit version, and of course the source code for all platforms is also available. It shouldn't be too long before the finished version arrives in the distro repositories.