81536171
submission
jlp2097 writes:
It looks like the recent activities by Hollywood studios and the AACS LA finally led to the closing of Slysoft Inc, creator of the popular AnyDVD HD tool for creating personal backups of BluRay/DVD/etc. Slysoft Inc's website confirms the closing due to "recent regulatory requirements". The final nail in the coffin has also been confirmed with slightly more details in their forum: "this is final. Slysoft is gone."
Sad to see them go — it looks like legitimate buyers of BluRays will now have to find other sources for backing up their property to HTPCs and NASes.
57408333
submission
jlp2097 writes:
As reported by Heise (german), Mozilla has introduced a new jpeg encoder called mozjpeg. Mozjpeg promises to be a "production-quality JPEG encoder that improves compression while maintaining compatibility with the vast majority of deployed decoders". The Mozilla Research blog states that Mozjpeg is based on libjpeg-turbo with functionality added from jpgcrush. They claim an average of 2-6% of additional compression for files encoded with libjpeg and 10% additional compression for a sample of 1500 jpegs from wikipedia — while maintaining the same image quality.
12047354
submission
jlp2097 writes:
There is a new article up on Microsofts IEBlog explaining why IE9 will only support H.264:
First and most important, we think it is the best available video codec today for HTML5 for our customers. Relative to alternatives, H.264 maintains strong hardware support in PCs and mobile devices as well as a breadth of implementation in consumer electronics devices around the world, excellent video quality, scale of existing usage, availability of tools and content authoring systems, and overall industry momentum – each an important factor that contributes to our point of view. H.264 also provides the best certainty and clarity with respect to legal rights from the many companies that have patents in this area.
The article goes into detail for each of these points and is an interesting read, confirming a lot of points already discussed here.
