Who reads Slashdot without checking xkcd? Anyone? I just happened to check Slashdot first today.

There's a project that lets you use CoreAVC on Linux using mplayer and wine. I've used it to play 1080p on my slightly underpowered Opteron box. I'm not sure if it works for the latest versions of CoreAVC though.

It amuses me how he says:

but immediately after that he says:

It sounds to me like one of two things happened. Either they decided to stop designing their product, or management decided that they didn't like *nix. And to think, you'd be hard pressed to find a mainstream open source app not ported to three or more platforms. Proprietary software is silly. :(

Drive geeks to their website? Everyone knows /. readers don't RTFA.

I use CoreAVC (through wine) when I want to play 1080p video without having to buy a slightly newer video card.

Well of course, I bought these systems before hardware h264 decoders were common. That doesn't make them useless. :(

I totally agree with you on AVI. MKV is a much better container format, especially if you want nice ASS subtitles or multiple soundtracks. Now, whether or not it was a good decision to remove it from HandBrake is their problem, as I don't use it anyway. :P

Well, TFA says:

So I think the confusion is justified. Does anyone know for sure exactly what is being removed from HandBrake?

My main box has what I consider to be a fairly recent video card, an Nvidia 7 series, but still doesn't support h.264 acceleration. I don't think the open source drivers support acceleration. My handheld certainly doesn't have any hardware acceleration, and can only really play xvid/divx at its native resolution. My Wii cannot play most h.264, but can play rather high resolution xvid. My point is, there are a lot of "underpowered" devices out there. If you're re-encoding video solely for quality, you're doing it wrong, because no matter which lossy encoding you chose it can never be as high quality as the original. I usually re-encoded video for compatibility. Size usually isn't an issue, so I try to keep things in their original encoding.

I should have mentioned earlier that I am a huge fan of h.264. I use it as much as possible and even called one of my friends an idiot for encoding his dvds with xvid, as his box is far more powerful than mine. I just don't think xvid is dead quite yet, as long as my Wii still runs.

Xvid and divx (mpeg-4 part 2) are far less resource-intensive than h.264. I don't know if anyone's ever tried playing a reasonably sized h.264 encoded video on a PIII, but it usually doesn't work out so well. Avi and divx I'm not so sure about, but I don't see why they had to get rid of xvid. Maybe I'm behind the times, but most of the time when I decide to re-encode something it's because I need to play it on a slow budget box like the ones they have at school.

Fixed that for you, Vegeta.

I've probably downloaded over 50 Linux ISO's in my time, but recently I've found that it's much easier to boot from the network or from a flash drive. Over half of my optical disk drives have bit the dust, and most of the disks I do burn wind up in a landfill after the first use. Plus, with network installers I don't have to download a bunch of updates right after I install. I still boot from optical media from time to time, but certainly not as much as I used to.

Heh, something tells me that Chinese proxies wouldn't work well for editing Wikipedia. :(

Is it wrong that I'm curious as to what the editor posted to get himself in trouble? Seems like the Streisand effect might backfire on the girl if the Internet is as cruel as I think it is.

I'm guessing Google censors the images by default because there aren't many Chinese language websites that actually display the controversial images, so Google doesn't associate the images with the Chinese text very well. This is just a guess, but might even explain why Bing seems to censor this. It's an unfortunate side effect of the way search engines work I suppose.

Yes, but how much of this market share comes from old Windows Live Search users? A quick Google search (haha, guess I'm not in that 10%) reveals old statistics that placed Live at around 10% also. Is this really news?

Does anyone know Dutch and have the time to submit better translations? At least for maybe the first few sentences. I want to see if this Google Translate thing actually works.