Category Archive: News & Updates

The final vote has begun! Please cast a ballot for MediaCoder. (Stanley posted on July 4th, 2007 )

The SourceForge annual Community Choice Awards final voting has begun. MediaCoder has just become one of the finalists in the category of best multimedia project. Thanks for all of you who nominated it. Now, please cast a ballot for MediaCoder to make it win the award.

Steps to vote:

  1. If you already have an account on SourceForge.net, you can skip this step, otherwise please take a little time to create an account on SF.net first.
  2. After you got your account, login with it and go to the voting page.
  3. MediaCoder is listed in the Best Project for Multimedia category (click the drop-down list and you will see it)
  4. You can vote for projects you like in other categories. If you are not familiar with some categories or has no choice, you can choose “I do not wish to vote”.
  5. Finally, click the “Submit all votes” button to submit your vote.

Thanks for your support. Hoping MediaCoder can win the award.

MediaCoder can rip CSS-protected DVD since build 3788 (Stanley posted on June 27th, 2007 )

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.

A performance issue on single-core processors fixed in build 3770 (Stanley posted on June 14th, 2007 )

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.

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XviD encoding speed vastly increased on dual-core systems (Stanley posted on June 6th, 2007 )

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.

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Nominate MediaCoder for SourceForge community choice awards 2007 (Stanley posted on June 6th, 2007 )

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!

Native Windows Media decoding/encoding added in build 3735 (Stanley posted on May 28th, 2007 )

The native Windows Media Audio/Video decoding/encoding support has been added, with the new Windows Media decoder source and Windows Media encoder backend. This will make MediaCoder possible to transcode any supported audio/video formats to the latest Windows Media Video 9/Windows Media Audio 9.1 and even Windows Media Lossless, which was having many limits before. Though I’m definitely not in any favor of M$’s A/V codec (fully closed), I must admit the fact that the support for it is needed by many users who has a Zune or a Pocket PC.

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