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Finally, HD DVD users now have the empirical evidence they’ve been looking for to prove that the universe really is conspiring against them. We figured we’d make ourselves useful over here and give you a list of things you can do with your poor, obsolete HD DVD player — starting with taking it out to dinner, excusing yourself to the bathroom before the check comes… then getting the hell out of there.

Gimmes

* eBay
* Doorstop
* Entertainment center cup-holder
* Destroy it. Office Space style.

Oh, the humanity

1. Mail it to the office of Howard Stringer in protest of Blu-ray’s victory.
2. Plug it into your clothes dryer’s 240-volt outlet. Woops, honey! My bad, guess we have to buy a Blu-ray player now.
3. Finally, replace your Betamax player.
4. Buy the Blu-ray player of your choice, put it in the box, attempt to return it as “defective.”
5. Channel it through Whoopi Goldberg and make some pottery with it.
6. Put a Blu-ray disc in the tray and then call up Toshiba when it doesn’t work. Repeatedly.
7. Put it in a time capsule, just to confuse future generations.
8. Buy a few dozen of ‘em and build a little hut for your Blu-ray player.
9. Lock it alone in a room with a few lethal weapons… let it die honorably.
10. Use it to upscale DVDs, which is all you ever used it for anyways.

Quoted from: http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/19/top-ten-things-to-do-with-your-now-defunct-hd-dvd-player/

The HD Specification
So what is HD? Hi-definition video is more than just a name to indicate an image has higher resolution than previous video forms, rather HD is a specific technical specification that all major hardware manufacturers and software developers have agreed upon for the future of film, TV, video and broadcasting.

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As I’ve been working on Windows XP x64, I am always interested to know how much difference of performance will VMWare and VirtualBox have on a 64-bit host system. VirtualBox has a native x64 version, but I haven’t yet found a native x64 version of VMWare. I guess this factor is likely to help VirtualBox to catch up with VMWare on x64 platform. Today I performed a benchmark for the two virtual machine applications by running MediaCoder in the guest system to transcode an DVD MPEG-2 PS clip of 720×480@29.97fps to an H.264 MP4 file of 320×240@29.97fps with MP3 audio. As there is no multi-processor support for VirtualBox and there is no sense to compare the video transcoding speed of a dual-core guest machine with a single-core one, I just chose Windows 2000 as the OS for guest machine.

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Finally a new version number in the new year. You may easily find out some changes from the screenshot if you have used MediaCoder for some time.

New splash:

Quoting the changelog:

0.6.1.4026

• [update] MediaCoder build 4026
  • [fix] audio copy not working with MP4Box and MKVMerge issue
  • [fix] Settings dialog blocking issue
  • [fix] FLV to AVI transcoding issue
  • [fix] Nero encoder CBR encoding issue

0.6.1.4023

• [update] MediaCoder build 4023
  • [update] left/right option tabs layout (more extendiable)
  • [add] several additional option tabs including tabs for x264 and XviD
  • [add] RSS feeds of forum posts
  • [add] file list item order adjustment (items can be move up and down)
  • [fix] 2-pass/3-pass encoding issue in recent builds
  • [fix] TTA decoding bug
  • [fix] many misc fixups
• [update] x264 r719
• [update] FFmpeg r11482
• [update] MPlayer/MEncoder r25659

Download link