An interesting bit of news from the doom9 forums. As anyone who is testing the Windows 7 beta has discovered, and as the above screengrab shows, Microsoft is breaking with tradition and including more codec support in the upcoming Windows bundle. Previous Windows versions did not even include MPEG-2 decoding, which proved to be quite mystifying to many users trying to watch a DVD in their computers for the first time. And, needless to say, Microsoft stayed far away from any of the more esoteric codecs, including the key MPEG-4 ASP implementations such as DivX and Xvid. However, the beta of Windows 7 includes the ability to play back DivX, and Xvid, and even the next generation MPEG-4 AVC, better known as h.264. More intriguing is news that Microsoft may be working on an implementation of the Matroska container (MKV) for Windows7. Why is all of this important? Read the rest of this entry »
