Free Republic

StreamingMedia.com on Monday announced the publication of two new reports that suggest that Apple’s QuickTime H.264 video encoding has gained ground on Microsoft Windows Media. The winner, however, was RealVideo. The reports are available for $295 each. The first report, “Proprietary Streaming Codecs, 2006,” pitted RealVideo and Windows media with compression schemes employee by top Flash Video and H.264 codecs. The report concluded that Flash and H.264 codecs trail RealVideo “often by a significant margin.” To test, a six-minute file comprising 38 scenes were encoded for model, 3GPP, 100Kbps, 300Kbps and 500Kbps playback. Frame quality, temporal and color quality and...

Security experts warned of vulnerability in MP3 and Windows Media files that can be activated simply by a user hovering his mouse over an infected file. The vulnerability could allow attackers to take over a user's PC. The flaw in Windows XP can force the operating system to run code when a music file is played by Windows Explorer, the operating system's file-browsing application. Hovering the mouse pointer over a file will open a preview of it and trigger the file's payload if it has one. The vulnerability does not affect Windows Media Player, Microsoft said. The popular Nullsoft Winamp...

<p>Thanks to a newly found flaw in Windows XP, two of the most popular audio file formats can be used by crackers to take control of remote PCs. Users only need to hover their mouse pointers over the icons for malicious MP3 or Windows Media files to execute the attacker's code, Microsoft Corp. said in a bulletin published Wednesday.</p>