I'm stumbling through this without a lot of technical knowledge when it comes to video. Sorry if this is a vague or simplistic question. How can I use it in a way that would be analogous to the standard RF settings (18, 20, 22) on the software encoder? I'd love to get some idea of how to use it, and what's actually changing when I move it around. You can convert pretty much everything, from a DVD or Blu-ray source to most common video files, to MP4, MKV, or WebM formats.

I found another conversation on another forum from a couple months ago that pointed out that this slider was grayed out on Intel Macs, but I haven't found any clear discussion about how it actually functions. Handbrake is an excellent video converter for Mac. HandBrake's popular-level VideoToolbox documentation seems pretty thin, and doesn't reference this slider. It's in the same place that the RF slider would be in if you were using the software encoder, but it's labeled CQ instead of RF, and the numbers on the slider seem to operate at a different scale. When doing an MKV/h.264 encode using the VideoToolbox encoder and selecting Constant Quality, there's a slider available that wasn't available on earlier versions on Intel-powered Macs (or, as far as I can remember, the Windows version of Handbrake, but I could be mistaken there). I've been trying out the version of Handbrake that's built for native compatibility with Apple's M1 SoC.

Handbrake m1 mac