The H.265 codec brings Ultra HDTV resolution in 2013

A new video codec is about to come in town, bringing a "Ultra" high-definition resolution that's 16 times larger than the standard "Full HD" resolution of nowadays' TV sets.

Just got a new, shiny 50” Full HD (1080p) TV set for your home video needs? Prepare to purchase something newer, shinier and with a much, much higher resolution soon. The Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding reached a new milestone for the H.265 video codec during the past week, and is about to unleash the new “monster” video standard within the next year.

The H.265 video codec, also known as High Efficiency Video Coding or HEVC, is being designed to replace the current H.264 standard used for high definition and Full HD (1920x1080) video encoding and decoding. The Joint Collaborative Team, a collaboration effort between the MPEG Expert Group and ITU-T, has just achieved a “committee draft” in a meeting in San Jose.

The new video standard is expected to provide a huge difference in data transmission and streaming efficiency compared to the previous one, with one of the speakers present at the meeting suggesting a 67% improvement.

H.265 will be designed to support new, still to be created video delivery and streaming technologies from day one, including devices working at 4K and Ultra HDTV (also known as 8K or 4320p) resolutions. Just to put things in perspective, the Ultra HDTV definition contains about 16 times the amount of pixels present in a 1080p video stream.

Before appearing on the market as a proper video standard, H.265 will have to achieve two more milestones: the draft international standard meeting is expected to be held within six months from now and the final standard ratification should arrive in January 2013.

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LAME 3.99

Today, LAME is considered the best MP3 encoder at mid-high bitrates and at VBR, mostly thanks to the dedicated work of its developers and the open source licensing model that allowed the project to tap into engineering resources from all around the world. Both quality and speed improvements are still happening, probably making LAME the only MP3 encoder still being actively developed.

I still use lame with Audiograbber convert CD's to MP3's. Just remember if you're using it with Audiograbber you want to unzip LAME 3.99 and the only two file you need are lame.exe and lame_enc.dll place these two in the programs directory on windows 64bit C:\Program Files (x86)\Audiograbber and it's pretty much the same with with 32bit windows it just won't say (x86) in it.


http://lame.sourceforge.net/
You can download from here http://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lame-bundle.php

MakeMKV

Software developers basically have DVD ripping down to a science at this point. No matter what operating system you run, you're only a few clicks away from importing a movie from a DVD to your hard drive. Blu-Ray, on the other hand, is a tougher nut to crack. That's why it's exciting to see a cross-platform app that handles both DVD and Blu-Ray ripping: MakeMKV.






















MakeMKV is a free download for all operating systems. DVD ripping will always be free, but Blu-Ray ripping is only free as long as it's in beta. So get it while you can for free to have all options.

Shark007's FREE Codec solutions

All the codecs you need play AVIs, DVDs and more!

It does not contain a media player and it doesn't associates filetypes. With this package installed you will be able to use any media player, limited only by the players' capabilities, to play DVD's, movies and video clips of almost any filetype.

http://shark007.net/index.html

Graphics Card Stability Test

FurMark is a intensive OpenGL benchmark, it uses fur rendering algorithms to measure the performance of the graphics card. Fur rendering is especially adapted to overheat the GPU.

If you want to or need to check on the stability of your graphics card than this is the utility for you! An example of a situation when you might want to use this is if you have changed the stock GPU heatsink, you want to see how well the new one is performing, you installed it properly and pick any overheating issues up quickly.

FurMark website

Jokosher The Linux Alternative for Garage band

Music lovers and producers who are looking for an alternative to the popular Garage band in Mac, Jokosher is definitely worth trying. It's a simple powerful multi-track studio. With it you can create and record music, podcasts and more, all from an integrated simple environment.

The idea of Jokosher is to provide simple and easy to use software for anyone and everyone to create music. You don’t need to have any music background or exceptional knowledge in making music. With Jokosher, all you need is a 5 minutes of the familiarization process and you will be able to create and record excellent music or podcasts for your site in no time.

The multi track studio allows you to mix and match different instruments and effects to create a cohesive music. In Jokosher, there is a wide range of instruments that you can add to your music. You can find acoustic guitar, bass drum, bass guitar, cello, drum kit, harmonica and many other instruments. Adding them to your music is simply a select and click task.











At your first startup of Jokosher, it will prompt whether you want to create a new project or load existing one. With the main screen you will see several icons to help you get started. You can add new instrument, import audio files or to start recording new music.









When editing your music, you can easily split the track into two or more and using the simple cut/copy/paste functions, you can add or create multiple layers of the same track, each with different effects.







Jokosher integrates well with the Gstreamer plugin. Anything that is supported by Gstreamer is available in Jokosher as well. You can import/export your music/podcast to mp3, wav, flac, ogg and anything else supported by Gstreamer.

When adding effects to your music, you may want to install the additional plugins to increase the number of choices.

sudo apt-get install blop caps cmt fil-plugins mcp-plugins omins swh-plugins tap-plugins

Once installed, you will be able to add these effects to your music.

Jokosher is very user friendly and surprisingly simple to use. There are lot of customization options and yet the developer is able to keep the interface simple without too many complicated items on the main screen to frustrate users.





Jokosher Website

PulpTunes Offers Dead Simple iTunes Streaming

Whether it be Windows, Mac or Linux: Streaming your iTunes collection doesn't sound like an easy task, but PulpTunes makes putting your music library on the web a two-click affair.
Access your iTunes music library from anywhere, through a web browser!


PulpTunes Website

DVD43

DVD43 is a free DVD decrypter that runs in the background and decrypts DVDs on the fly.

WHAT DOES IT DO?: DVD43 will decrypt (unlock) a movie DVD so that your copy program can read it. If the DVD structure is non standard or the DVD contains bad sectors, your copy program needs to take care of that.


DVD43 Website

iTrip Universal

Just bought one of these recently and I'm happy with it :) easy to use and the built in battery that charges via usb is simple to do.
If you need a simple way to play your mp3 players music in your car you can use this FM transmitter.
It does a fair job just remember to turn the mp3 players volume to full and back down before you use headphones. So as long as your car has a FM radio this can make your trips a bit better.
I did by a longer 3.5mm stereo plug to 3.5mm stereo plug as the included cable is very short. Being able to place it more easily the audio was clearer to. So if your car CD player doesn't have ipod support or usb this is a handy way to get around that :)

iTrip Universal

Master Your Digital Media with VLC

A nice guide by Adam Pash to using VLC to Rip Any DVD, Convert Any Video for Your iPod or iPhone, Stream Media to Other Computers, Play Ripped DVDs.


Link

FairGame

FairGame will convert the songs you bought on the iTunes Store to an unprotected format (using iTunes default encoder) and keep all the original metadata, lyrics and artwork. It takes 2 min. 42 sec. to convert a 4 min. song to AAC on a MacBook Pro 2.16GHz.

What you MUST DO (only once) to get FairGame to work:
Enable Access for assistive devices in the Universal Access & system preference
select; Place clip in Movie Timeline in the Import & preference of iMovie HD

Then you can simply: select some songs in iTunes click on the Process button & then don't touch anything and wait until it's done...
(FairGame is scripting iMovie's interface to process the songs, don’t interfere)

FairGame

Identify missing codecs

GSpot Codec Information Appliance
GSpot is a tool that allows you to see what audio and video codecs the video file uses in order to determine what you need to install on your system to watch it. Program supports OGM, MPEG, RealMedia, Windows Media, Flash and AVI

WebSite

CDex is a CD-Ripper

This software is for extracting digital audio data from an Audio CD. The application supports many Audio encoders, like MPEG (MP2,MP3), VQF, AAC encoders.

CDex Website

GOM Player

GOM is a FREE media player with popular audio & video codecs built-in.

GOM Player supports most popular codecs (AVI, DAT, MPEG, DivX plus many more) with its own embedded codec system that you won't have to look for appropriate codecs everytime you can't play a certain video format. For those codecs that require a license that cannot be distributed, GOM will automatically lead you to an open-source codec web-site.

GOM Player Homepage

Avidemux

A free alternative to Adobe Premiere

Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities.

Avidemux is available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows under the GNU GPL license.

Avidemux Homepage

CamStudio

CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs)

Here are just a few ways you can use this software:

* You can use it to create demonstration videos for any software program
* Or how about creating a set of videos answering your most frequently asked questions?
* You can create video tutorials for school or college class
* You can use it to record a recurring problem with your computer so you can show technical support people
* You can use it to create video-based information products you can sell
* You can even use it to record new tricks and techniques you discover on your favourite software program, before you forget them



CamStudio Homepage

Some of the best Video Help

Probably the best site online for anyone needing help with video. If you need to know which is the best app for editing DVD's or how to capture from your camcorder, this is the only place to go. No matter what format your video is in, there will be something on this site to point you in the right direction. Invaluable.

ViDEOHelp.com

DVD Flick

Burn almost any video file to a playable DVD.
DVD Flick aims to be a simple but at the same time powerful DVD Authoring tool. It can take a number of video files stored on your computer and turn them into a DVD that will play back on your DVD player, Media Center or Home Cinema Set.

Features:

* Support for over 45 file formats
* Support for over 60 video codecs
* Support for over 40 audio codecs
* Add your own subtitles

DVD Flick Homepage

Perian

Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats. For Mac OS X 10.4.7
Perian enables QuickTime application support for additional Media Types:

• AVI, FLV, and MKV file formats
• MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivX, H.264, FLV1, FSV1, VP6, H263I, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), MPEG Layer II Audio
• AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3
• Subtitle support for SSA and SRT

Homepage

PodWorks

PodWorks is a Mac OS X application that compensates for the iPod's only downside: Apple only allows you to copy songs to your iPod.
If you have two Macs and want to use your iPod to transfer music from one to the other, or you only store your music and videos on your iPod and need to copy them back onto your hard drive after a disk failure, you are out of luck!

This is where PodWorks allows you to copy songs and videos from any iPod or iPhone to any Mac running OS X 10.4 or higher.

PodWorks Homepage