Star Theora 1.1 (Thusnelda) Stable Release
Linked by Kroc Camen on Fri 25th Sep 2009 22:19 UTC, submitted by clododunord
Multimedia, AV "We are pleased to announce a new stable release of libtheora, the Xiph.org Foundation's reference implementation of the royalty-free Theora video format. This new release, version 1.1, codenamed Thusnelda, incorporates all of the recent encoder improvements we have been making over the past year, though some of the code had its genesis all the way back in 2003. It also brings substantial speed and robustness improvements to the 1.0 decoder." For a more visual run-down of the changes, check out Mozilla's excellent article.
E-mail Print r 10   38 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/h5s
Thread beginning with comment 386539
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[6]: Comment by kaiwai
by lemur2 on Mon 28th Sep 2009 01:02 UTC in reply to "RE[5]: Comment by kaiwai"
lemur2
Member since:
2007-02-17

I thought the free-enterprise theory was that proprietary software companiens were supposed to try to put the MOST functionality into their code in order to attract customers? Yet we seee, apparently, the exact opposite ... they deliberately refuse to support stuff which would give their customers some freedom and actual choice. Hmmmmm.


For a little more musing on the topic of how proprietary offerrings seem to give you so much less functionality for so much more money, here is an interesting review of the upcoming Windows 7 (Professional) versus some other possible choices of operating systems.

http://www.psy-q.ch/blog/articles/2009/09/13/win7-review-from-free-...

Windows 7 is neither overly powerful, customizable or modern. It does avoid many of the problems of Windows Vista by introducing aggressive prefetching and changing the UI design so actions require less clicks, and this makes the system appear faster. This comes at the expense of chewing up a lot of RAM, so a gaming system should probably have 4 GB or more.

Windows 7 makes a good OS for gaming simply because so many games are available on it. There is no other reason.

Windows 7 makes a reasonable OS for everyday work (office suite, web browser, e-mail, watching media files, simple games). It is RAM-hungry while doing that, although the same could be said about a fully customized KDE 4. Media file support is very weak out of the box. If gaming is not a priority for you, you would be better off replacing Windows with one of the FOSS systems. That gets you freedom in addition to an operating system that does everything you need.


I hope that this review illustrates what I mean. The issue of the media player is discussed.

The included media player appears to be a resource hog and can only play very few media formats. It couldn’t identify a Matroska file correctly, and then failed to download the appropriate codecs, even though it acted as if it could. A third-party player (like VLC) is necessary if you have any sort of variety in your media collection.


Apparently, Windows 7 messes up even the very simple text editor included:

I am typing this in Win 7’s included text editor, and it has been acting strangely from time to time. When I select some text, some other text might slip down one line and ruin my selection. When I save via Ctrl-S, my cursor often jumps back by a random number of characters (2 – 4). Sometimes selecting text becomes impossible as well (the cursor freezes when clicking anywhere in the window). Copying the text and pasting it into another application (e.g. a browser) makes random newlines appear all over it. It looks messy, like a battlefield. My text was thoroughly raped, even the copy saved to the file is broken, and only Windows 7’s editor can even display it now.

I don’t know how, but Microsoft managed to break ASCII text files. That’s an achievement.


It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. A lot of people have to put up with this sort of stuff.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1

RE[7]: Comment by kaiwai
by gustl on Mon 28th Sep 2009 17:51 in reply to "RE[6]: Comment by kaiwai"
gustl Member since:
2006-01-19

Hehe...

Getting ASCII files locked into a Microsoft text editor definitely is an achievement.

If I were given the task to do it, I would not know how to pull this off.

The Microsoft Windows text editors have been the worst editors out there anyway, but topping that sad score really makes me think Microsoft is well on it's way to hell.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2