Useful guides and tutorials related to codecs and multimedia.

Why music codecs and speech codecs are built differently, which audio format to pick for what, and how to fix an old clip that plays with no sound.

Why AV1 flattens the battery on some laptops and not others, how to check which side your hardware is on, and the fixes that actually work.

Windows does not open .jxl files out of the box, and the free Microsoft extension only installs on recent builds - here are four routes that work on any version.

Every Android release from 1.0 to 17 with dates and features, plus which versions still get security patches and which to avoid buying in 2026.

Why there is no AV1 codec to download on Android, which players already decode it, and how to tell whether your phone does it in hardware.

Copy-paste FFmpeg and rav1e commands for AV1 encoding, covering 10-bit, tiling, film grain synthesis and which quantizer to pick.

A plain-English walkthrough of every way to get LAME MP3 Encoder 4.0 running on Windows, from the command line to Audacity to no install at all.

A screenshot walkthrough of Hypic's Mosaic and Cutout tools, the two free ways to blur a background or remove it entirely on Android.

Three free ways to open AVIF images on Windows, from a browser workaround to the AV1 Video Extension, plus a fix for the IrfanView AVIF.DLL plugin error.

EAC3 track will not play on your TV or phone? Convert it to AC3 or AAC free with XMedia Recode, keeping the video untouched so it takes minutes, not hours.