Today, two more signs of the forthcoming apocolypse.

(1) Apple announces the first Macs with Intel Inside, as Steve rubs “man, can you believe how friggin’ slooow the PowerPC was?” salt into our collective wounds several times during the keynote. (Wouldn’t want to be Kottke right now…)

(2) With somewhat less fanfare, Microsoft delivers Windows Media Components […]

If you do Windows Media Video 9 or Windows Media Audio 9 encoding, you need the Windows Media Format 9.5 SDK.

Although it isn’t documented anywhere that I know of, the SDK includes these very important updates:

The new Windows Media Video 9 Advanced Profile video codec (which implements the Advanced mode of the proposed VC-1 standard) Performance […]

The DVD Forum has announced that they’ll be choosing the video codec for the next-generation, high-definition DVD standard (tentatively called HD-DVD) by March. Here are the four options in the running:

AVC Also known as H.264, this is the next MPEG-4 video codec. It was created by The Joint Video Team (JVT), which is a cooperative […]