Back when I originally reviewed VP8, I noted that the official decoder, libvpx, was rather slow. While there was no particular reason that it should be much faster than a good H.264 decoder, it shouldn't have been that much slower either!

Free software multimedia software, codenamed "Works with HTML5" as the special focus on this release were a lot of improvements that are relevant for HTML5 video. The H.264 and Theora decoders are now significantly faster and the Vorbis decoder has seen important updates.

"Here's a simple decoder for BitTorrent's torrent encoding format, bencode. This uses the iterator-based approach from Simple Iterator-based Parsing, which results in readable and pretty efficient code."

Less than a year after the release of Theora 1.0, the wonderful people at Xiph have released Theora 1.1. The 1.1 release is a software-only release of the Theora encoder and decoder. It does not include any changes to the Theora format.

Broadcom has released Linux drivers for the Crystal HD video decoder accelerator card. This card can be put into a netbook to enable HD video playback.

FFmpeg is a complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec, the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can compiled under most operating systems, including Windows.

Google Inc. has removed an open-source project that enables the proprietary CoreAVC high-definition video decoder to run in Linux following a complaint from the codec's developer -- but the project could soon return.

The release of FFmpeg 0.5 last March was significant as it was the first official release in quite a while for this popular and widely used free software media program. Fifteen months later, FFmpeg 0.6 has been released with plenty of changes including support for Google's VP8 codec / WebM and improvements for HTML5/H.264 video playback.

The MythTV hard disk recorder software is available in a new version that is based on Qt4 and supports new hardware and the VDPAU decoder.