Since build 3788, MediaCoder can rip CSS-protected DVD to any supported formats. Please note that you’ll need to update to 0.6.0.3788 with a full pack installation.

Today I found that recent builds have a critical performance slowdown on single-core processors. As I am using a Intel Core2 which is a dual-core processor, I failed to notice this issue until I was told that MediaCoder’s speed on single-core processors has recently become very slow under some combinations of settings.

After some investigations, I concluded that this issue occurs when following factors meet together:

• Target video format is XviD
• Target container is other than AVI (e.g. MP4)
• Audio is not disabled
• Audio encoder is an executable (instead of a DLL)

The root cause of the issue is the the priority of audio encoder process is not set properly, which causes the audio transcoding thread to fall behind the video thread seriously and brings performance penalty.

On dual-core processor, this won’t be an issue because a low-priority process (in this case, the audio encoder process, e.g. lame.exe) won’t be blocked by another busy process (in this case, the process of MediaCoder).

Luckily it is found out and fixed. Please update to build 3770.

For a successful AMR encoding in MediaCoder, you have these steps to follow:

1. Update MediaCoder to 0.6.0.3760 or later
2. Download and install AMR Codec Pack for MediaCoder
3. Start MediaCoder, switch to Audio tab and set Audio Encoder to AMR
4. You can choose between AMR-NB or AMR-WB in the AMR tab on the right side
5. Do click on either AMR-NB or AMR-WB radio box as this clicking will make the correct resample and channel options (8Khz/mono for AMR-NB and 16Khz/mono for AMR-WB)

XviD encoding core is updated with the multi-threading enabled version in MediaCoder 0.6.0.3750. This brings increase in XviD encoding speed by 30-40% on dual-core systems.

SourceForge.net is presenting the second annual Community Choice Awards. Winners are selected by community members, just like you. If you like MediaCoder, please do cast a ballot for MediaCoder to nominate it. Winning this awards will be a great honor for me in my lifetime and bring me big motivation to improve MediaCoder towards perfection.

Here are the steps to do the nomination:

1. If you already have an account on SourceForge.net, you can skip this step, otherwise you’ll need to create an account on SF.net first (I know this takes some time, but please do me a favor).
2. After you got your account, login with it and go to the nomination page.
3. Choose a category that you think is best fit for MediaCoder. If not sure, you may just choose Best Project for Multimedia. You can nominate MediaCoder in more than one category if you want to.
4. That’s all. As the SF.net page says, the final voting will begin on July 9th. By then, I’ll still need your ballot!

Firefox 3 is going to provide a wide range of improvements to performance, stability, and security, and it’s also going to present several new user facing features. Here is a quick recap of design work that’s been going on in the Mozilla community over the past few weeks for Firefox 3, along with information about how you can help contribute, by providing feedback on these designs, or creating your own UI mockups.

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, Apple announced that YouTube.com videos would become available on the Apple TV after a software update that will be made available in June.

iLounge spoke with Apple’s Vice President of Worldwide Mac Hardware Marketing, David Moody, who provided more details about this upgrade.

According to Moody, not all of the Youtube catalog will be available on day one. Instead, “thousands of videos designed for Apple TV” will be available at launch, but that the remainder will become available by the fall. The reason for the delay is that Youtube will be encoding all of their videos into a “H.264 streaming-efficient compression format” specifically for the Apple TV. All of Youtube’s videos are currently encoded in Flash Video (FLV) format.

While no official reason is given for the mass transcoding of Youtube’s entire catalog, Macformat.co.uk believes it has to do with the iPhone.

As far as I know even now, Flash content per se might not play on the iPhone from day one. But Apple clearly doesn’t – indeed, shouldn’t – care, as YouTube is for many people the most critical site that uses Flash.

Indeed, both the iPod and iPhone can play H.264 encoded video, and so it seems the entire Youtube catalog may also become available to those devices later this year.

In an early iPhone FAQ, Jobs described this exact scenario:
Markoff: “Flash?”
Jobs: “Well, you might see that.”
Markoff: “What about YouTube–”
Jobs: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”