With GPUs getting more and more powerful, it makes sense to use all this ‘idle’ processing power for heavy duty tasks. And thinking of processor heavy tasks, compression is anybody’s guess.

In return of WMV support on Nokia handsets, Microsoft has agreed to support open standards MPEG AAC and OMA DRM. Couldn’t Microsoft find a better reason for supporting these “Open” standards?

Microsoft’s legal team has been Taking Care of Business. By filing a patent application ahead of Apple, Bill Gates may have prevented an Apple windfall.

A pre-release snapshot of the lossless audio compressor OptimFrog is available on Florin Ghido’s web site.

Independent makers of pre-recorded DVDs have told the European Commission that a coterie of big companies (Philips/Toshiba/Mpeg LA) use patents to choke their income, violating European Union law.

The Blu-ray Disc Association said Tuesday that it has settled upon the AACS rights-management system to secure its discs, together with an additional identification and update scheme. Both the competing Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats will use the Advanced Access Content System, which was specifically designed for next-generation optical discs.

Displaying PNG files in an MFC project is nice and easy with Achim Klein’s PngImage class.

Creative’s new line of products can recreate the effects and quality lost during lossy compression. Does this means that data compression algorithms can be more liberal with what is lost during compression, then artificially recreating the ‘quality’ during decompression?

I’m not entirely clear on what this GSPx conference is all about, and in only their third year, I’m not sure the organizers are either. But the theme is Pervasive Signal Processing, and the keynote speaker is Andrew Viterbi, so I guess you can’t go wrong hanging out for a few days. You care about this because one of the conference themes is video compression, with a special focus on VC-1, H.264, and SVC. According to the folks at WindowsForDevices.com, Microsoft is giving a four session tutorial on their beloved VC-1 codec, featuring:

• Introduction to VC-1
• Implementation of the VC-1 decoder
• Getting the most out of the VC-1 format (implementation of encoder)
• VC-1 systems

If you are reading this, chances are good that Information Theory gives you a bit of a buzz. Now comes the notion that under certain cirumstances, Quantum information can be negative. In other words, if I give you a message, you know less than you did before!