So the wonderful folks over at Handbrake have released their newest version of their DVD ripping and encoding software. The highlights? Well now that the AppleTV supports Dolby Digital 5.1 you can now grab the surround sound and encode it into the video file! Awesome right? Well there’s more… They also have figured out how to support a Stereo AAC feed contained in the same file. What does all that mean? For the first time you can encode once with 5.1 and Stereo in 1 file and have it playback with 5.1 on your AppleTV and stereo on your iPhone. Just awesome! I am commencing ripping my entire DVD collection!

Kind of a bummer. I had been hoping that HD-DVD would pull out a win but alas it wasn’t meant to be.  Even though they never got around to implementing it Mandatory Managed Copy was the big piece that made me hope for HD-DVD. Managed copy would allow you to not only make copies of your HD-DVDs but also potentially move the content to other non-HD-DVD devices. It is a part of the Blu-Ray spec but is not mandatory and doubt it will be ever used.  A real shame. I had only purchased about 25 HD-DVDs so I am not too bad off, I had read the writing on the wall about 6 months ago and picked up a PS3 for the Blu-Ray player and now have about 35 Blu-ray Discs. In one sense I am just glad the format war is over and now I no longer have to worry I am building an obsolete library. Feel sorry for my brother though who has about 100 HD-DVD movies, man if my investment in 25 hurts I can only imagine how 4 times that investment has got to feel…. ouch! RIP HD-DVD.

We just received our new Select Comfort 5000 bed and going to give it a week or so before posting the full review. Just a heads up it’s coming!

That’s how Ars Technica described Microsoft’s 44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. My thoughts? Pretty bummed actually. I use Flickr and a few other Yahoo services and hate the possibility to have Microsoft’s stench touch them. Making me really look at using my SmugMug account exclusively if Yahoo does end up being purchased. I guess time will tell but don’t see how this will a good thing for two different companies who have been unsuccessful at toppling Google’s stranglehold on search combining to form one company that will be unsuccessful at toppling Google. I really think Yahoo’s strong point is their service offering and they ought to focus on that area rather than search. Same with Microsoft, they ought to be focusing on their OS business (I am looking at you Vista). But hey what do I know?