They will go work in libraries.

The problem with making user to pay for YouTube is quite simple : Brand recognition.

YouTube was a huge success thanks to stupid short videos with bad to just correct video quality. See it, laugh at it (or facepalm) and forget it.

There is certainly a market for flash streaming of premium content (movies, series, animes, shows...), but not with the youtube name. Create a new site, allow only professionnal or professionnal-looking content on it, raise the minimum quality requirements to 480p H.264, find a cool name, and it should work.

The other problem is the insane CPU eating habit of the flash player, but that's quite another story.

AAC decoding was possible thru FAAD (GPLv2). Now, FFMPEG can decode it natively with its own LGPL code.

Not a big difference for a lot of people, but quite important for some third parties using FFMPEG.

At first they use the AVI container because they came from the windows world. Then they extend it ("DIVX Container") to support subtitles and menus without breaking compatibility with the first hardware players. MP4 would have been easy to implement on PC, but not for hardware players (not enough memory for example).

But today, since they use H.264, they have to break compatibility, and current hardware players are more versatile, enabling theme to support more recent container formats. That's why they discarded AVI. The choice of MKV over MP4 is debatable, but not illogic. MKV natively support more formats for audio and subtitles, is largely used for "Rips"...

That's simple : DivX is a video software, not a video format. It always has been. DivX 4-6 is based on one standard format : MPEG-4 Part 2 (aka MPEG-4 Visual, aka MPEG-4 ASP). So they are just updating their software to support the latest standard format, H.264 (aka MPEG-4 part 10, aka MPEG-4 AVC).

The equation video codec = video format is just a bad habit, and most of the time false today with proprietary things like Indeo ou RealVideo less and less used.

Governments have to understand cartography can no longer be restricted to military or other officials.

GPS, camera, satellites are ubiquitous, and we can see the result with things like Google Earth or wiki-like mapping. You can no longer make imprecise or secret maps. You can no longer forbid photos of any place you can see from a public location. You can no longer base your security on obscurity.

After all, the bad guys probably already have all this information. You have to assume they have it, or your doomed to failure. Just make officially all those things public, and find new ways to implement security for your important places, for people, for the country...