The goal here is simple: Play all the videos that I have ripped from DVD, downloaded from the web, shot with my own cameras or obtained in some other manner, no matter what the format. It sounds simple, but Apple TV can't do it. Neither can the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. Video codecs and containers are a nightmare to keep track of, and even more of a nightmare to convert.

This isn't about photos and music. Apple TV is better at both of those than any of this stuff. It's also not about renting movies or buying movies, or even streaming movies from Netflix. Roku has a nice cheap box for that, and Apple TV is suitable if you just want to live inside Steve Jobs' media store. This is about playing non-DRM movies, pure and simple.

The names might be familiar to you: The Popcorn Hour C-200 by Syabas is quickly gaining cult status (and has its own hacker wiki), while the other four smaller boxes come from brands you probably have experience with, including WD, Seagate, Netgear and Patriot. None have built-in wireless, but they all have Ethernet ports.

My two main tests were simple—I loaded PC and Mac formatted external hard drives with a variety of files ranging from H.264 MP4s to WMVs of several vintages, from raw AVCHD files in MTS wrappers to the hot new DivX 7 MKV. Then I browsed through my local network to a NAS that had a cache of similar files. Could I see them? Could I play them? These shouldn't be issues, but they're big issues.

Here's a rundown of each machine, and how they fared in testing:

As you can see, there were clear leaders given my criteria above, but what struck me was how each one differed. Truth is, depending on who you are, any one of these might be the best fit. Here's what really separates them:

WD TV Live - $150

I would have given this thing the solo spot at the top if it weren't for a few dings that might very well be fixed in a firmware update: It won't show you DVD menus on ripped DVD images, and when you play files with the suffix .m4v, it won't fast forward or rewind. Weird bug, and can be fixed if you just change .m4v to .mp4, but since that's the default file naming for Handbrake's "Apple TV" profile, it could be a problem for people, like me, who spent months ripping their entire DVD collection that way.

WD's strengths include a friendly user interface with handy video previews, some promising early online services (including Pandora), and the most reasonable photo and music handling I've seen in this cluster of gadgets.

Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ - $150

I loved this when I tested it a few weeks ago, despite its fugly interface, and it holds up under testing. It does better with ripped .ISO files than WD, doing both DVD menus and chapters (and it doesn't have that weird .m4v bug either). Video was better, especially when running 1080p content. And when it came to browsing my Linksys NAS in search of movies, it could reach more and read more than the WD.

The tradeoff is that the interface is bad, and there's almost nothing in the way of online services. It gets points for making an attempt at sorting music, and displaying photos, but if that's a priority, WD is the better call.

Popcorn Hour C-200 - $300

Hardcore AV nerds love this thing, and I understand why. There are more ways to get at video content than in any other set-top box I've ever seen, and if you really know how to hack, there's really not much it can't do.

It's a big ole thing—they call it a "network tank," and despite remind me of the far cooler ones in Tron, I get it. It has an internal BitTorrent client and you can plug in a Blu-ray drive, for God's sake. I found very few video formats that it wouldn't support (FLV was one) but I had to take major points off because for being so big, it has a lame interface, and it comes with an RF remote that only worked when I stood within 3 feet. They even mention that there might be problems with interference, and that if people experience that, they can buy the IR remote. Great, thanks.

My only question—and, commenters, it's not rhetorical—is why spend $300 on this (plus extra for the optional internal HDD and the IR remote) when you can just buy a home-theater PC?

Patriot Box Office - $130

This was the dark horse of the group, being a late entry by a company known only for computer memory. I was surprised at how well it held up. It actually could decode more tested formats than any other device in this lineup—it did Flash video (FLV), which the three above can't render. Only the WD and the Patriot show you video previews, too. As small as it is, there's a space for a 2.5" SATA drive in there, and even a BitTorrent client. You can copy files to and from different drives and the network, and it's the cheapest of the lot, at $130.

So why did it come in a distant 3rd? Unlike the three above, it can't read Mac formatted hard drives, and its video quality was noticeably the worst of the batch. That said, if you are a hacker sort and want something to play with that doesn't cost as much as Popcorn, set your sights on this.

Netgear Digital Entertainer Live

As you can probably tell by now, Netgear had the most disappointing box of the lineup, despite its Apple TV ripoff of a look and feel. Lack of Mac media support and the inability to read key file formats, like DivX 7 and AVCHD, meant it couldn't pass muster with real video fanatics. Its biggest point of woe was the fact that it didn't support any file over 720p in resolution—whether that's a software thing or a hardware thing, it's sure not future-proof, and probably best to stay away.

I also didn't like the fact that its interface is laid out entirely for retail, like an Apple TV without the panache, or a Roku box that costs more and doesn't do Netflix. Local files were not a priority, and despite the friendly interface, it doesn't even make an attempt to differentiate photos and music. I did give it a gold star for online services, but only because it had the most in this group—if online services are what you love, buy a Roku, or a TiVo, or an Xbox, or a friggin' Apple TV.

Still not sure what you're looking for, check the spec comparisons here:

Update: At the urging of many readers, I recently tested the Asus O!Play and found that it does all of the things the Seagate can do (except fit Seagate-branded FreeAgent drives inside), but at a lower cost—$100 vs $130 in today's pricing. If you have narrowed your options down to the Seagate, skip over to my Asus O!Play review before making your final decision.

iFrame's based on industry-standard codecs H.264 and AAC, but it's got a standard res of 960x540 and it's designed by Apple "to speed up importing and editing by keeping the content in its native recorded format while editing."

Currently, the only two camcorders using iFrame are the Sanyo VPC-HD2000A and VPC-FH1A. The question is what other cameras are gonna be using it and how much of a real standard iFrame's going to be. We all know how much Apple loves setting standards. [Apple via Cnet]

They Call It "Open" For a Reason
One of the more excellent aspects of Snow Leopard, actually, is its full-scale deployment of OpenCL 1.0—Open Computing Language—a framework that allows programmers to more easily utilize the full power of mixes of different kinds of processors like GPUs and multi-core CPUs. (Much of the excitement for that is in leveraging the GPU for non-graphical applications.)

OpenCL lives up to its name: It is a royalty-free open standard managed by the Khronos Group, and supported by AMD/ATI, Apple, ARM, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, among others. Interesting thing about this open industry standard is that it was developed and proposed by... Apple.

What Is a Standard?
By "standard," we're talking about a format, interface or programming framework that a bunch of companies or people or organizations agree is the way something's going to get done, whether it's how a movie is encoded or the way websites are programmed. Otherwise, nothing works. A video that plays on one computer won't play on another, web sites that work in one browser don't work in another, etc. With increased connectedness between different machines and different platforms, standards are increasingly vital to progress.

Standards can range from open (anybody can use them, for free) to open with conditions (anybody can use them as long they follow conditions X, Y and Z) to closed (you gotta have permission, and most likely, pay for it). Some companies view standards strictly as royalty machines; others don't make much money on them, instead using them to make sure developers do things the way they want them to. Apple falls into this latter category, by choice or possibly just by fate.

Kicking the Big Guy in the Shins
Of course, OpenCL isn't the only open standard that Apple's had a hand in creating or supporting that actually went industry-wide. When you're the little guy—as Apple was, and still is in computer OS marketshare, with under 10 percent—having a hand in larger industry standards is important. It keeps your platform and programming goals from getting steamrolled by, say, the de facto "standards" enforced by the bigger guy who grips 90 percent of the market.

If you succeed in creating a standard, you're making everybody else do things the way you want them done. If you're doubting how important standards are, look no further than the old Sony throwing a new one at the wall every week hoping it'll stick. Or Microsoft getting basically everybody but iTunes to use its PlaysForSure DRM a couple years ago. Or its alternative codecs and formats for basically every genuine industry standard out there. To be sure, there is money to be made in standards, but only if the standard is adopted—and royalties can be collected.

Web Standards: The Big Headache
The web has always been a sore spot in the standards debate. The web is a "universal OS," or whatever the cloud-crazy pundits call it, but what shapes your experience is your browser and in part, how compliant it is with the tools web developers use to build their products. Internet Exploder shit all over standards for years, and web programmers still want IE6 to die in a fiery eternal abyss.

Enter WebKit, an open source browser engine developed by Apple based off of the KHTML engine. It's so standards-compliant it tied with Opera's Presto engine to be the first to pass the Acid3 test. What's most striking about WebKit isn't the fact it powers Safari and Google Chrome on the desktop, but basically every full-fledged smartphone browser: iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Symbian and (probably) BlackBerry. So WebKit hasn't just driven web standards through its strict adherence to them, but it has essentially defined, for now, the way the "real internet" is viewed on mobile devices. All of the crazy cool web programming you see now made is made possible by standards-compliant browsers.

True, OpenCL and WebKit are open source—Apple's been clever about the way it uses open source, look no further than the guts of OS X—but Apple is hardly devoted to the whole "free and open" thing, even when it comes to web standards.

All the AV Codecs You Can Eat
The recent debate over video in the next web standards, known collectively as HTML5, shows that: Mozilla supports the open-source Ogg Theora video codec, but Apple says it's too crappy to become the web's default video standard—freeing everyone from the tyranny of Adobe's Flash. Apple says Ogg's quality and hardware acceleration support don't match up to the Apple-supported MPEG-4 standardized H.264 codec, which is tied up by license issues that keep it from being freely distributed and open. (Google is playing it up the middle for the moment: While it has doubts about the performance of Ogg Theora, Chrome has built-in support for it and H.264.)

Apple has actually always been a booster of MPEG's H.264 codec, which is the default video format supported by the iPhone—part of the reason YouTube re-encoded all of its videos, actually—and gets hardware acceleration in QuickTime X with Snow Leopard. H.264 is basically becoming the video codec (it's in Blu-ray, people use it for streaming, etc.).

Why would Apple care? It means Microsoft's WMV didn't become the leading standard.

A sorta similar story with AAC, another MPEG standard. It's actually the successor to MP3, with better compression quality—and no royalties—but Apple had the largest role in making it mainstream by making it their preferred audio format for the iPod and iTunes Store. (It saw some limited use in portables a little earlier, but it didn't become basically mandatory for audio players to support it until after the iPod.) Another bonus, besides AAC's superiority to MP3: Microsoft's WMA, though popular for a while, never took over.

FireWire I Mean iLINK I Mean IEEE 1394
Speaking of the early days of the iPod, we can't leave out FireWire, aka IEEE 1394. Like OpenCL, Apple did a lot of the initial development work (Sony, IBM and others did a lot of work on it as well), presented it to a larger standards body—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers—and it became the basis for a standard. They tried to charge a royalty for it at first, but that didn't work out. It's a successful standard in a lot of ways—I mean, it is still on a lot of stuff like hard drives and camcorders still—but USB has turned out to be more universal, despite being technically inferior. (At least until USB 3.0 comes out, hooray!)

Update: Oops, forgot Mini DisplayPort, Apple's shrunken take on DisplayPort—a royalty-free video interface standard from VESA that's also notably supported by Dell—which'll be part of the official DisplayPort 1.2 spec. Apple licenses it for no fee, unless you sue Apple for patent infringement, which is a liiiiittle dicey. (On the other hand, we don't see it going too far as industry standard, which is why we forgot about it.)

That's just a relatively quick overview of some of the standards Apple's had a hand in one way or another, but it should give you an idea about how important standards are, and how a company with a relatively small marketshare (at least, in certain markets) can use them wield a lot of influence over a much broader domain.

Shaping standards isn't always for royalty checks or dominance—Apple's position doesn't allow them to be particularly greedy when it comes to determining how you watch stuff or browse the internet broadly. They've actually made things better, at least so far. But, one glance at the iPhone app approval process should give anybody who thinks they're the most gracious tech company second thoughts about that.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about standards, things that are open other than your mom's legs or Sony Ultra Memory Stick XC Duo Quadro Micro Pro II to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Once upon time, video codecs and formats were really only the concern of AV nerds, anime freaks and hardcore not-so-legal movie downloaders. Now, even the most part-time of geeks has to deal with them, whether they're trying to stream a flick across their house with an Apple TV, dump some video onto their phone or just trying to grab last night's episode of Dexter because they, uh, forgot to renew their Showtime subscription. It's messy and annoying, but we're here to clean it up. Take a deep breath.

You might recall our discussion about video bitrates earlier, or how much data is packed into a file. As a general rule, more bits per second translates into more betterer quality audio and video. The variable in that—the other part of the equation—is how the content is compressed and de-compressed. Better compression techniques—the zen of knowing what bits of data to pull out to make big data chunks smaller—make for better quality video while taking up less space on your hard drive. Basically, the part you need to know is that codecs are the software that make that magic happen.

Standard Standards
• H.261 is not a term you have to worry about, but it's the technology that most video standards and codecs were originally based on. Originating in 1990, it's the first major digital video compression standard, and like other "H" standards, it was developed by the International Telecommunication Union. This one was primarily for teleconferencing over ISDN lines, and as such, it looks like ass.

• MPEG-1 Part 2 is another oldie, developed by the Movie Picture Experts Group and approved in 1991. (BTW, the whole "part" thing is because video is just one "part" of each MPEG standard.) Based quite a bit on H.261, MPEG-1 was designed to take VHS quality video and squeeze it down to a bit rate of about 1.5Mbps, optimized for CD transfers. No surprise, it's the standard used for all VCDs (which can play in most DVD players), but not a standard you would see hanging around today.

• With MPEG-2 Part 2, approved in 1994, we're finally talking decent vid. Also known as H.262, since it was developed jointly by the ITU-T and ISO, MPEG-2 is an extension of MPEG-1 that delivers better resolution and higher bit rates (3-15Mbps for standard def and 15-30Mbps for HD, though the spec allows for up to 100Mbps). It's the video codec used by DVD and digital television, though now it's slowly being replaced by the more efficient MPEG-4, except on DVDs, where it'll ride out that disc format's lifetime.

• H.263 is designed for sending video over crappy connections. So it's used to encode most Flash video and to send video over mobile networks.

• MPEG-4 is where we really stand right now. It has a much broader scope than past MPEG standards, aiming to tackle both the low end (crappy cellphones on a crappy network) and the high end (Blu-ray). It's still developing, so it's not-so-coincidentally where this whole story gets messier. There are two relevant parts of the MPEG-4 standard for our myopic video purposes: There's Part 2. And there's Part 10—which is also known as H.264 or Advanced Video Coding (AVC). To be clear though, even though they're both part of the MPEG-4 standard, they're totally different formats. Nevertheless, both are more efficient at compression than past MPEG codecs, delivering better quality using less space.

• Okay, so if you've ever frequented a Torrent site, you've actually watched tons of videos that use MPEG-4 Part 2, though it's not like they would've had a flashing sign telling you so. MPEG-4 Part 2 actually has different "profiles"—the two that matter being Simple Profile, for low bitrate, low-res stuff, and Advanced Simple Profile. The latter profile is what's used by movies you would download in formats like DivX or XviD or 3ivx—which are all codecs that are essentially just differing implementations of the MPEG-4 Part 2 standard.

• MPEG-4 Part 10, the other part, was actually co-devopled by MPEG and the ITU-T, so it's also known—in fact, more commonly known—as H.264. It's more efficient than MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 2, delivering the same quality video in as little as half the space, making it suitable for the low and high-end. Because of this, it's quickly becoming the standardest standard. It's part of the HD DVD and Blu-ray spec, replacing MPEG-2 in digital TV (like with satellite services and AT&T's U-Verse IPTV) and supported by pretty much every portable video player on the planet from the iPod to the PSP. Apple has a decent, if Kool-Aid flavored, FAQ about H.264.

• VC-1 is essentially a Microsoft developed alternative video codec to H.264 released as a standard by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, though it descends from the same H.26X/MPEG family. (It essentially started life as WMV9, but then Microsoft shopped it to the SMPTE to make it an industry standard, and now it is.) It too, is part of the mandatory Blu-ray and HD DVD spec, and is the official video codec of the Xbox 360. It's pitch is the same as H.264's—trying to deliver better quality using less space, like HD video in 6-8Mbps.

Free-Floating Codecs
Okay, so all that stuff up there are industry-wide standard video codecs. On top of all of those, various entities love putting out their own spin on those standards. As we mentioned before, DivX (proprietary) and XviD (open source), for instance, use MPEG-4 Part 2 (more specifically, MPEG-4 ASP) compression, meaning stuff that'll natively play back MPEG-4 ASP will also play back DivX. Like the Xbox 360, for instance. There are a ton of MPEG-4 ASP-based codecs, actually, like FFmpeg, 3ivx and others, but DivX and XviD are the most common. Same deal with H.264: Some well known codecs that use it are Apple's Quicktime H.264, x264 and Nero Digital. You've also got Windows Media Video (WMV) codecs, which are Microsoft's proprietary twists on industry standards.

Containers aka Wrappers
Alright, well you've probably noticed that none of your video files have the extension .h264 or .vc1 or the like. That's because videos are packaged in containers or wrappers that stuff things like the audio, navigational info, etc. along with the video in a single pretty file. Naturally, there are about as many of them as there are codecs. To be clear, you would take a video encoded with, say, H.264, and wrap it up as a .mp4 or .avi file.

The majors ones are:
• AVI (Audio Video Interleave) is Windows' standard multimedia container
• MPEG-4 Part 14 (known to you as .mp4) is the standardized container for MPEG-4
• FLV (Flash Video) is the format used to deliver MPEG video through Flash Player
• MOV is Apple's QuickTime container format
• OGG, OGM and OGV are open-standard containers
• MKV (Mastroska) is another open-specification container that you've seen if you've ever downloaded anime
• VOB means DVD Video Object. Guess what? It's DVD's standard container, and what you get when you rip a DVD.
• ASF is a Microsoft format designed for WMV and WMA—files can end in .wmv or .asf

So, in order to play a video file, your setup has to be able to handle both the actual video codec and the container. It's why you can try to play an AVI file and Windows Media Player laughs at you, even though it totally played one a minute ago— the container was no problem, but it didn't have the right codec. Or conversely, even though an iPod could play back an H.264 encoded video, if it was wrapped up in MKV, it won't be able to read it.

Okay, my brain hurts. Hopefully this will make yours hurt less when it comes to dealing with pesky videos. If you'd like to do even more homework, Wikipedia, as always, has a more in-depth discussion. And Doom9 is always an amazing resource for all things digital video.

Something you still wanna know? Send any questions about codecs, kitties or pad thai (but not RealMedia) to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

[Image: ME@Flickr]

One Mac Rumors forum member found that the new Air ran a full 10 degrees cooler playing back the same video, since it apparently dials back the CPU as the GPU picks up the video jujitsu. One wonders just how much it'll help (or hurt) battery life too, if at all. [Mac Rumors]

As far as upgrade details go, the PS3 is DivX-certified, meaning not only is playback guaranteed to function properly, but game developers can also use the compression format for in-game cutscenes In comparison, the Xbox 360 merely supports playback of DivX-encoded videos [DivX]

The Price: $99

The Verdict: Testing on a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 2GB RAM, exporting a movie to iPhone using the Turbo.264 on default settings with Quicktime Pro used less than 50% CPU and took about 11 minutes, whereas exporting the same movie with the same settings without the device used 100% CPU and took 15 minutes.

To make sure it wasn't just Quicktime's export functionality determining the encode speed, we tested exporting for iPod using Elgato's default encoding app versus iSquint, which does something very similar. iSquint used a little over 50% CPU and took 8 minutes to encode a 22-minute episode of Venture Bros. into an iPod format, and Elgato's encoder (using the Turbo.264) also used a little over 50% CPU and took 5 minutes.

Elgato claims performance gains will be much more dramatic on machines with lesser processing power, so keep that in mind as you decide whether this is right for you. Even on a pretty new machine, we saw speedups of around 50%, which is pretty substantial. For us, it's definitely a good buy if you encode video for your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV frequently and want to save time (and CPU cycles) in the process. [Elgato]

What does that mean for us? Over the next few months, watching video over the web (think YouTube, MySpace video, streaming video everywhere) will be noticeably improved, finally taking advantage of those fancy graphics cards you have tucked into your PCs and Macs and H.264, too. Another big plus is that the AAC audio codec is so efficient that it frees up more processor power for handling video. Adobe also told us it's slipped in better support of multi-core processors as well.

Adobe's offering this latest addition to Flash 9, code-named Moviestar, as a beta download now, and says this fall it will be rolling out as an automatic download into the Flash support that's spread across 98% of the Web.

You'll recall Apple's celebrated announcement of YouTube support. However, the fine print suggested you couldn't get all YouTube video, but only those that had been rolled over to the Apple-favored H.264 video codec.

Although this was arguably a technical hurdle, Archos had just announced and demonstrated a Wi-Fi media player that could easily browse YouTube, and queue up any video on the site, using an Opera browser with Flash plug-in. Did the Archos 605 have that much more processing muscle? Teardowns of the iPhone have revealed a sufficiently sturdy ARM processor, so we think it's doubtful.

My suspicion is that a Flash-friendly iPhone wasn't good leverage to convince Google to adopt the H.264 codec crucial to the YouTubin' success of the browserless Apple TV platform. By giving YouTube special favoritism in the iPhone launch, Apple got Google to do its codec swaperoo. But people have demanded more, because this isn't just about YouTube. People want Flash for non video stuff, too. (Games, websites that choose to unwisely use it for their entire menu structure)

A more simple and therefore probably reason is that Apple and Adobe didn't have enough time to build it into the phone. Not an issue, since firmware every quarter, flush with features, is the way gadgets roll these days. (Zune, Xbox, Wii.)

The man who ought to know, Walt Mossberg, says that Flash will come as a simple software update, answering our question about technical capability:

Apple says [to Mossberg, not to the general public] it plans to add that plug-in through an early software update, which I am guessing will occur within the next couple of months.

Questions About Apple's iPhone [Allthingsd.com]

PS3 Update [PlayStation]

You will be able to download content over Wi-Fi or EDGE, according to the press release. (My guess is that one will be better than the other.)

This doesn't mean Flash video on iPhone. YouTube is encoding its content in H.264, and the iPhone will be "the first" mobile device to use those videos. That means, at launch, you won't be able to get at the entire catalog of YouTube video, but the Apple press release states that the conversion of all YouTube clips to H.264 will be complete by the fall.

YouTube Live on Apple TV Today; Coming to iPhone on June 29

Best YouTube Experience on a Mobile Device

CUPERTINO, Calif., June 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple(R) today announced that iPhone(TM) users will be able to enjoy YouTube's originally-created content on their iPhones when they begin shipping on June 29. A new Apple-designed application on iPhone will wirelessly stream YouTube's content to iPhone over Wi-Fi or EDGE networks and play it on iPhone's stunning 3.5 inch display.

In addition, Apple announced that YouTube is now live on Apple TV(TM). Users can download the free software update using Apple TV's built-in software update feature, and then easily navigate through YouTube's familiar video browsing categories or search for specific videos. YouTube members can also log-in to their YouTube accounts on Apple TV to view and save their favorite videos.

"iPhone delivers the best YouTube mobile experience by far," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Now users can enjoy YouTube wherever they are-on their iPhone, on their Mac or on a widescreen TV in their living room with Apple TV."

To achieve higher video quality and longer battery life on mobile devices, YouTube has begun encoding their videos in the advanced H.264 format, and iPhone will be the first mobile device to use the H.264-encoded videos. Over 10,000 videos will be available on June 29, and YouTube will be adding more each week until their full catalog of videos is available in the H.264 format this fall.

The combination of H.264-encoded videos plus iPhone's built-in Wi-Fi networking, stunning 3.5 inch display, and custom YouTube application with its multi-touch user interface results in the best YouTube experience on any mobile device.

Pricing & Availability
iPhone will include the built-in Apple-designed YouTube application when it is available in the US on June 29, 2007 in a 4GB model for $499 (US) and an 8GB model for $599 (US). iPhone will be sold in the US through Apple's retail and online stores, and through AT&T's retail stores.

Apple TV users can download the free software update using Apple TV's built-in software update feature.

On Monday we brought you a PMP from Asuka and compared it to last year's Epson P-5000. Well, Epson has come back with their P-3000, a 40GB HDD which plays H.264 videos on its 4-inch screen. It's Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Mac compatible and you'll get three hours' battery life for movies, and six for music playback. All that is available for $499 Stateside. – Ad Dugdale

The subordinate model of Epson and H264 reproducible HDD storage [PC Watch through Google Translate]

They're both recording in that beloved H.264 compression scheme that's so squeaky-clean and compact, with the SD3 using a high-capacity SDHC flash card (good for 90 minutes of 1080i video) and the hump-backed DX3 using an old-timey DVD, which we can certainly do without.

Check out the gallery below, and jump for pricing, availability and commentary.

These two models ought to give JVC's similarly outfitted and outstanding $1799 HD Everio GZ-HD7 camcorder, which we've had our hands on and like very much, a run for its money. But then, that JVC camcorder has a 60GB hard drive on board, and the $1270ish Panasonic SD3 includes a 4GB SDHC flash memory card.

Rolling out in Japan late this month, expect to see these two sharpshooters by late Spring here in the United States. While still a bit pricey for the mainstream, it won't be long before all camcorders are made this way. – Charlie White

Panasonic HDC-SD3 and HDC-DX3 AVCHD Camcorder [I4U]

Instead of using your processor to encode and decode video, this Turbo 264 offloads the job so you're free to do other things. The implications of this are recording a screencast in real time, or doing real-time transcoding of various content that you can stream to your Apple TV. Or, you can just use it (rather boringly) to make videos for your iPod and iPhone fast.

For now, it's only available in Europe for 99 Euros. – Jason Chen

Turbo 264 [Macwelt]

Sanyo keeps improving their Xacti video-cameras: their Xacti CG65 adds H.264 recording, MPEG-4 advanced video coding at 640 x 480 pixels and 30 frames per second, which uses less memory than previous versions while increasing the image quality. It now can store up to 80 minutes of high quality video in a one Gbyte Secure Digital HC card, and it will perfectly integrate with QuickTime 7 and your iPod to boot. Sanyo also says that they have improved the noise level of its 6 megapixel CCD for both photos and movies. The only drawback is that its weight has increased to 6 ounces from the previous 5.2, which is easily offset by its new lime green color. Anything lime wins points for a compulsive caipirinha drinker like me. A couple more photos after the jump. –Jesus Diaz

Product page [Sanyo Japan via Akihabara News]

The benefit of this is the ability to play video smoother on lower-end hardware (see Apple TV), and the possibility of DVR usage. How's that? Because this same H.264 chip is capable of encoding as well as decoding, which means you may be able to turn any Mac into an H.264 DVR, or "effortlessly" record screencasts without taxing your CPU, which is doing whatever it is you're currently recording. – Jason Chen

The Great Apple Video Encoder Attack of 2007 [PBS]

So what this means is you can take a DVD's worth of video and crunch it down for 320x240 playback on your iPod or PSP in 20 minutes, something that can take five hours to do with software encoding. And this baby can do that with a slew of media formats, too, including MP4, MP3, AVI, WMV, MOV, RM, JPG, and TIFF. Yeah, ADS. This we gotta try. – Charlie White

Products Page [ADS Tech]

This is not the first attempt at such a device; there's the iSee recorder we showed you last January that just came on the market last month to mixed reviews, intended more as a video player enhancement for iPods that aren't equipped for such things.

The iRecord is cool stuff. Compressing into H.264 for $200? Sounds like a bargain. Now if you can just somehow get used to watching video on such a tiny screen, the iRecord might just be worth it. – Charlie White

Product Page [Streaming Networks, via iLounge]

If you're not familiar with 1seg, it's an HD mobile digital video broadcasting service in Japan that was officially launched in April of this year, and uses the H.264 video codec.

Although this Toshiba unit does have a widescreen, there was no info available about its resolution, nor was there any word about its ship date and availability. But if it can't handle at least 720p, well, that would be just dumb. – Charlie White

CEATEC - Toshiba 1Seg DVD-PMP player [Akihabara News]