The ffvp8 library is this new VP8 decoder created by three FFmpeg developers and after a few weeks of work it's already complete enough to be bit-exact with that of Google's libvpx, while it's much faster than the official decoder.

"Here's a simple decoder for BitTorrent's torrent encoding format, bencode. This uses the iterator-based approach from Simple Iterator-based Parsing, which results in readable and pretty efficient code."

Free software multimedia software, codenamed "Works with HTML5" as the special focus on this release were a lot of improvements that are relevant for HTML5 video. The H.264 and Theora decoders are now significantly faster and the Vorbis decoder has seen important updates.

Broadcom has released Linux drivers for the Crystal HD video decoder accelerator card. This card can be put into a netbook to enable HD video playback.

Less than a year after the release of Theora 1.0, the wonderful people at Xiph have released Theora 1.1. The 1.1 release is a software-only release of the Theora encoder and decoder. It does not include any changes to the Theora format.

The MythTV hard disk recorder software is available in a new version that is based on Qt4 and supports new hardware and the VDPAU decoder.

biosdecode is a command line utility to parses the BIOS memory and prints information about all structures (or entry points) it knows of.

NNTPGrab 0.6 Beta 1 now has support for plugins. With this it will be easy to add new functionality to the program in future releases. Right now several plugins are already available. The yEnc decoder, PAR2 repair and automatic unpack functionality have been moved to individual plugins.

If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents. Pdftk allows you to manipulate PDF easily and freely. It does not require Acrobat, and it runs on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris.