In late July, This American Life aired an episode titled "When Patents Attack!" that reported on some of the problems that software patents cause developers and businesses. It introduced the subject to new audiences in a compelling way, so we wrote to them to thank them for their excellent reporting.

In this tutorial I will focus mostly on manipulating and converting files to free formats, which in our case will be FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) and Ogg Vorbis (free lossy codec), but support for MP3 is also included where it is the case. These formats are not patented and are free to use without the need to pay for using them.

We're looking for a few volunteers willing to commit an average of a few hours per week as reliable technical consultants helping people transcode their videos to free formats like WebM and Ogg Theora. In particular, we want to provide this assistance for people who record videos of Richard Stallman's speeches around the world, and other FSF events.

Highly optimized Theora free videocodec for TI's OMAP3 DSP is here. This DSP can be found in many devices, like: Palm Pre, Motorola Droid, Nokia N900 and others. Decoding on N900 of 800x480 video at 33fps gave only 20% CPU load.

Google will soon make its VP8 video codec open source, we’ve learned from multiple sources. The company is scheduled to officially announce the release at its Google I/O developers conference next month, a source with knowledge of the announcement said.

Ask most computer users what their preferred video codec is and they'll look at you as if you asked what sort of motor they'd prefer in their washing machine. ``We just want it to work!'' they say. In this regard, it’s exactly the same for content creators and publishers. Every visitor to a website that can't view a video is one set of eyeballs less for a message to get through to.

GNU/Linux has never been short of audio and video players, but they live in a world of multiple codecs, chief culprit amongst them being MP3, AAC, WMA and (Adobe) Flash. I say "culprits" because they are not free and open codecs. They are encumbered by patents; most websites with embedded audio/video use them and most of the people who view them are also using other patented software: Windows.

Since last week's announcement of the YouTube and Vimeo beta versions which use HTML5's element, the Mozilla developers have been defending the fact that Firefox 3.6 cannot play the content on these betas even though it supports HTML5. The reason for the problem is that the HTML5 working groups decided not to specify which video codecs the tag would support.