Dropping Snow Leopard Support

Starting from v2.16, HandBrakeBatch will only run on OS X Lion and Mountain Lion, the two most recent versions of Mac OS X. I was not planning of abandoning Snow Leopard, and I might restore the support in the future, but at the moment I can't afford to maintain it.

Currently (from v2.15), HandBrakeBatch crashes on Snow Leopard, although I have not used anything not-compatible with this OS. Actually there seems to be a problem with the last version of Xcode: even if I compile an older version of HBB with the latest Xcode, the result crashes on OS X 10.6. At first I though it was a problem with the garbage collector, but even after moving to Automatic Reference Counting (ARC, a long due migration), the application still crashes. Most likely there is something in the HBB project which causes this incompatibility: I can't believe that the new Xcode simply does not work with 10.6. Still, at the moment I do not have the time to investigate further. Also, I do not know how many users are still on 10.6, but looking at Apple upgrade stats it must not be that many. I will raise a bug with Apple, but in the meanwhile I will drop the support for 10.6. Please add a comment here if you think support for 10.6 is important, if there is enough interest I will spend more time investigating. Also, if any of you still has a real 10.6 development machine and can fix the issue, I will be more than happy to integrate the code.

If you are on Snow Leopard and for any reason can't upgrade, you can download HBB v2.14, the last version which works correctly with 10.6.

I will release v2.16 of HBB shortly: this version is code-signed, and won't raise security alerts on Mountain Lion. If you find any new crashes, this might be linked to the move to ARC from Garbage Collection, please let me know!

Image courtesy of Leopard-Pitcures.com