When it comes to media players, you’ll be hard pressed to find a more flexible solution than the VLC Media Player. We’ve always liked VLC because it will play just about any kind of video you throw at it, regardless of the platform, often without the use of external codecs.

VLC may not have the prettiest interface or the flashiest site, but today’s version 1.0 is the most feature-complete playback solution you can possibly download. That makes it a winner in our book.

Bonus: A portable version of VLC will soon be available courtesy of PortableApps. Piss off your administrators by bringing something better than Windows Media Player to work on a USB key.

Reencoding files to work on a portable device is the fine art of suffering through a gigantic pain in the ass. As every player supports different codecs, framerates, dimensions and bitrates, you either take a crash course in media encoding or get a tool to do it all for you.

Dan Cunningham’s EncodeHD will take that blob of pr0n videos and rejigger them into the right format for BlackBerries, iPods, consoles, iPhones and more. There’s not much control over the process, but only tightwads are going to cry over some banding in the blacks on a screen the size of a postage stamp.

Image courtesy of Dcunningham.net

Cross-section of your lunch, scanned. (via Simplebits)

Trent Reznor gives the DL on TicketMaster’s complicity in scalping. (via Waxy)

The Chill Pill

When it comes to portable media, the sad truth is that speaker quality generally goes out the window as speaker sizes decrease. Today’s small laptops prove this trend, as recent releases like the MacBook Air contain only a single speaker beneath the keyboard. While these solutions are inexpensive and gentle on battery life, they leave something to be desired when used for anything beyond system sounds.

While manufacturers have, in part, circumvented this issue with the prevalence of headphone jacks, what about situations where you don’t want to (or can’t) use headphones? Small Dog Electronics’ Chill Pill speakers were created for that purpose, and today Icrontic will be taking a look at them.

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While the popular media encoding program Handbrake has been available for some time, recent updates have made it vastly better than ever. The newest version of today’s download of the day now accepts input from virtually any media source, not just DVD! Though DVD decryption support has been axed from the latest version (boo DMCA), the new features should more than make up for the loss.

Smaller than the Premier model, the Antec Veris Basic is a simple way to convert any PC into a media center.

PNY, in a weirdly-timed move, has released a special edition 2gb USB memory key with the movie “Ghostbusters” installed on it.

It is available now for £29.99. SCREECH… whoa, wait… What?

£29.99! That’s an extremely high premium over a normal 2gb USB drive. A quick jaunt around Argos shows that most are in the £14.99 range.

Our recommendation? Go the the local grocer and find a copy of Ghostbusters in a discount bin for £4.99.

Don’t get me wrong, Ghostbusters is a great film – one of this authors’ all-time favorites in fact… But there is no way I’d pay £15 for it, unless it was the definitive, remastered, collector’s edition hi-def Blu Ray version of it. As we understand it, this is a 480p, highly DRM’ed, highly compressed version that will play on PCs/laptops only (we’re thinking probably Windows Media) and must have the key inserted to play.

Scoring a solid “meh” from Icrontic, we’ll take the pass. Find another gatekeeper.

(Ed note: Ah, the cost of licensing. What am I going to do with this key now?)

I’ve had a project kicking around in the back of my mind for a few years now. It recently came up again and I decided to really move on this.

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NVIDIA skeptical of Larrabee

As Intel beavers away on bringing their discrete GPU to market, NVIDIA has chalked the Larrabee up to wishful thinking. John Mottram, chief architect for GT200-series core admitted that Intel is “not a stupid company” but remains skeptical of the performance of the final product.

“They’ve put a lot of people behind this, so clearly they believe it’s viable. But the products on our roadmap are competitive to this thing as they’ve painted it. And the reality is going to fall short of the optimistic way they’ve painted it. As [blogger and CPU architect] Peter Glaskowsky said, the ‘large’ Larrabee in 2010 will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI.”

Mottram also went on to admit that NVIDIA had to work to catch up with the technology of ATi’s famed 4000-series Radeons. While NVIDIA has held the single-GPU speed crown until the recent release of the Radeon 4870 X2, the stunningly-high prices of the 200-series have kept them from gaining a foothold with consumers.

Blackberry Bold launched in Canada

Our friendly igloo-dwellers to the north are the first in the world to get their hands on the retail version of the long-awaited Blackberry Bold. Canadian mobile carrier Rogers released the beauty this weekend. Engadget has delivered a snazzy unboxing video while Americans await the September release from AT&T.

RAMBUS debuts terabyte-speed ICs

Last year RAMBUS announced that it would be pursuing an initiative to deliver terabyte-level bandwidth for memory. Dubbed the Terabyte Bandwidth Initiative (TBI), RAMBUS hoped it could develop new memory technologies that would crush the 100GBps bandwidths we can achieve today in idealized applications like GDDR.

RAMBUS appears to have done it with the announcement of 1TBps on-chip/off-chip bandwidths. While the products are obviously in testing phases, the company hopes to commercialize their technologies and bring crazy-fast speeds to the masses.

Recent speculation about a chip change in Apple’s product line has been rife since July 21, when CFO Peter Oppenheimer said to expect a dip in profits from a “product transition”. However, Apple has flatly denied a move away from Intel CPUs or chipsets, which was most peoples’ first guess.

Cringley thinks the news is related to a year-old story about Apple adding a H.264 chip that both decodes and encodes. Cringley explains:

The last I heard NHK was claiming the chip could compress a 1080p video and audio stream into four megabits per second, down from the 20 megabits normally required. If we assume Apple will apply the same kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge transcoding to 1080p that they’ve already applied to 720p in the Apple TV, then it is within reason to expect they’ll claim to distribute 1080p over iTunes in two megabits per second.

The theory goes that Apple is moving to corner the HD market in its iTunes store a full year before other companies can develop a competing technology. This comes on the heels of not-so-recent news that Apple has taken the #1 spot in music distribution in the US, finally surpassing Wal-Mart. It’s possible they’re on track to do the same with HD video content.

Blu-ray? Isn’t that how they used to do HD back when we used optical media?

Chris Brogan gives us a list of 50 extremely useful web apps, summarizes their cost (many are free), categorizes them, and gives links. A handy little list.