HandBrake

NVIDIA, Intel and AMD hardware encoding, an automated watch-folder converter, Selkies — the most complete HandBrake container for Unraid.

What is this?

A modern, plug-and-play Docker image for HandBrake, the open-source video transcoder. You get the full transcoder GUI in your browser via Selkies, dark by default using HandBrake's own native GTK dark mode, plus a watch-folder daemon that transcodes anything dropped into /watch without opening the UI at all. Hardware encoding is supported on all three major GPU vendors — NVIDIA NVENC, Intel Quick Sync and AMD VCE — which no other HandBrake container on Unraid covers. Built on Ubuntu (via linuxserver/baseimage-selkies), so NVIDIA's proprietary glibc libraries load without issue, something the Alpine-based community image has never been able to ship. Everything is configurable from the Unraid template, no SSH or config-file editing required.

Highlights

• GPU-accelerated hardware encoding on every major vendor — NVIDIA NVENC, Intel Quick Sync (QSV) and AMD VCE — the only HandBrake container on Unraid that covers all three

• Selkies instead of noVNC — a hybrid VNC/H.264 web desktop with a real bidirectional browser clipboard, native file upload/download, high-DPI ready, no separate VNC client

• Dark by default — HandBrake's own native GTK dark mode, not a repaint; switch to light with one variable

• Automated watch-folder conversion — drop a file into /watch, get a transcode in /output; atomic output so a media scanner never indexes a half-written file

• 5 conversion hooks — before/after every job, end of a scan pass, per-file custom arguments, and a hook for conversions started manually in the GUI

• Staging directory — keep in-progress transcodes off the array while they run, on a cache pool or elsewhere

• Web file manager, a web terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and desktop notifications, all built into the browser session

• Shared-watch-folder locking — run two containers against one watch folder to convert twice as many files at once, safely

• Multi-arch — amd64 + arm64, both gated by a CI smoke test that really transcodes a clip before anything is published

• Image: ghcr.io/junkerderprovinz/handbrake:latest

Requirements

• Unraid 6.10+

• For NVIDIA hardware encoding: the Nvidia-Driver plugin (ich777) and --runtime=nvidia in Extra Parameters

• For Intel or AMD hardware encoding: --device=/dev/dri in Extra Parameters, and the host's open-source i915/xe (Intel) or amdgpu (AMD) kernel driver

• A reverse proxy is optional — the container already serves HTTPS itself on port 3001 with a self-signed certificate

Posting a bug report

Please post:

• Unraid version (Settings → System Information)

• Image tag (latest or a pinned vX.Y.Z)

• Output of docker logs --tail 200 handbrake

• Your GPU_VENDOR setting, and if it's not none, the output of docker exec handbrake cat /config/handbrake-gpu.log

• Whether you changed any AUTOMATED_CONVERSION* variable, or the /watch / /output / /storage mounts

GitHub issues with the same info are also welcome: github.com/junkerderprovinz/handbrake/issues. Got AMD hardware, or Intel hardware older than a Gen12 iGPU? A hardware report helps close the last unverified gaps.

Credits

Packages HandBrake (GPL-2.0, artwork CC BY-SA 4.0) on top of linuxserver/docker-baseimage-selkies and the Selkies web-desktop project. If this saves you a trip to a proprietary transcoding tool, you can buy me a coffee.

Self-hosted, AGPL-3.0-licensed wrapper around GPL-2.0 HandBrake — you run it, you own your data and the responsibility.