March 10, 2004

Extremetech looks which video codec’s provide the best quality in "near-DVD" (1 Mbit/s at 720x480) and quarter-resolution (360x240) at 500 kbit/s. They conclude that Microsoft’s Windows Media Version 9 and DivX 5.1.1 come out on top in quality over Apple’s QuickTime 6.5/Sorenson3 and QuickTime 6.5/MPEG-4 encoder through the Microsoft encoder is slower then the others. The choice of test material – rips from the Matrix Reloaded, Spider-Man, X-Men 2 and Monsters, Inc. is somehow odd and will impact given that the tests was to see what was the best choice for home video. The article stated: this is an article for those who want to compress video for home use: to e-mail to family members, put up on a Web site, burn onto a CD, re-compress to fit on a PDA or portable video player, or just archive for later use. Our focus is on middle-of-the-road bitrates suitable for download or CD archives, not extremely low bitrates for streaming over the Internet or very high bitrates for DVD-ROM based packaged media. Given this target testing the codecs by encoding DVD rips does not tell much about how the codecs can handle home movies such as baby walking or a wedding. The should have used homemade movies as a source – few people are going to send a Pixar movie to another person as an e-mail attachment but they may send one of a family event. 11:14:14 PM

Slight Delay eWeek reports that Microsoft has confirmed that Yukon, the next major update of its SQL Server database, and Whidbey the next update of Visual Studio will now ship in the first half of 2005. They also have received final names Yukon is SQL Server 2005 and Whidbey is Visual Studio 2005. 11:13:34 PM