OStatic

An open source energy future? Energy Secretary Stephen Chu has seen our energy future and says it?s open source.

Internet Explorer market share plummeting--or is it? Did it drop more precipitously in June than people think?

Ultimate Firefox productivity tips, for geeks. Using keywords, and keyboard shortcuts.

Apple wary of Ogg Theora: No agreement yet on HTML 5 video standard. Firefox 3.5 and Chrome already support the new video tag of the HTML 5 specification.

A comparison of open source search engines. Here are benchmark tests for Lucene, Xapian, zettair, sqlite, and sphinx.

Chris Blizzard kindly drew my attention to an update on the improvements being made on the Theora encoder. Though the details given about the advances made are very technical, the end result is visible in the examples shown on the update page.

Blizzard nicely sums up the essence of these updates: Overall, regardless of bitrate, the Theora encoder is showing significant improvement, and is even creating higher quality streams than those encoded with H.264 at numerous bitrates. It's also become evident that at least some of the previous testing that showed Theora lacking were performed with utilities that didn't necessarily mesh well with Theora in the first place (ffmpeg2theora, when linked with a recent version offfmpeg, did not produce the same issues).