Xbox Media Center was declared the winner of Sourceforge’s Best Multimedia and Best Game. Operations like unpacking a movie are now done on the fly, and the system is gaining constant popularity. Xbox Media Center is a free open source multimedia player resource. It can be used to play/view most common video/audio/picture formats such as MPEG-1/2/4, DivX, XviD, MP3, AAC, JPG, GIF plus many more less known formats directly from a CD/DVD in the Xbox DVD-ROM drive or from the Xbox hard-drive. Xbox Media Center can also stream files from a PC over a local network and even stream media streams directly from the internet. Now all the programs runs faster and this application have a lot of new features. Maybe Xbox Media Center is not only one of the best existent SourceForge projects, but one of the most useful pieces of technology you can find nowadays. Xbox Media Center comes with a full Python install with extensions to access the menu system. A built in web server is also included so you can use your gaming console even for that.

Yahoo! has launched a new Video Search service very similar with the existing YouTube and Google Video. Yahoo! Video Search is the first one that forces you to watch commercials before every video. This is maybe the only new feature compared to the other already existent video sharing sites. Yahoo! responded to Google Video with a poor copy with nothing new. Most of the video clips are hosted on other sites ( Discovery, AOL Music, Forbes, iFilm, Business Week and Showtime ) with just a few submitted through the Yahoo! service on top of which Yahoo! deliver the ads. If this is how they want to fight with Google in the Search Engine market in future they’ve already lost.

According to a research firm, all the materials used for building the next generation DVD drives and the licenses for the codec used will cost somewhere around $400, with most of the money spend on licenses. This already has a big impact on the announced price of PlayStation 3 ($500 - $600, with a loss of about $200 for Sony). However, now you can get a cheap DVD Player for about $30, a HD DVD player with $500 and a Blu-Ray version with $1000.

This will make the adoption of the new standards to be very slow, because of the price of the next generation DVD Players and due the fact there are no movies available yet in this new formats. Also you need to have a HDTV to make it real worth the investment.

This next generation DVD format war might also decide the winner in the next generation gaming console war, the price being a decisive factor.