All questions regarding Vici MVC, Vici CoolStorage, Vici Parser, Vici WinService and all other future Vici projects can be viewed and answered on http://vici.stackexchange.com.

The old http://support.viciproject.com URL will redirect you to the new support location.

While there are lots of possible applications, this online tool will fit your needs most of the time: SVG to raster image conversion.

First, you can all enjoy the official 1.0 release of ASP.NET MVC by downloading it from the Microsoft Download Center.

I must say that I’m not really thrilled about it, because I’m already enjoyng an excellent MVC framework for ASP.NET called ProMesh.NET. It’s lightweight, open source and a perfect match with the open source ORM CoolStorage.NET. Both projects will become part of the Vici Project collection of free tools.

Of course I’ll try out ASP.NET MVC, but I must say I expect it to be “too much, too heavy”. I like it to be no-nonsense and lightweight.

Second… The horror of Internet Explorer continues… Microsoft released the 8.0 version of their web browser. As a real opposer to Internet Explorer I will not install it to use as my daily web browser, but I need it to test my web applications. You want to download it and install it out of free will, please visit the Internet Explorer homepage.

After trying it out using a VM installation (Thank you, VirtualBox!) I’m convinced. I’ll drop Avant Window Manager (AVM) and install GNOME Do instead.

Check it out at the Phoronix website.

For more information I shamelessly copied/pasted the news item from the FFmpeg website:

It has been a very long time since we last made a release and many did not think we would make one again but, back by popular demand, we are proud to announce a new release: FFmpeg 0.5. Check out the release notes and changelog.

It is codenamed “half-way to world domination A.K.A. the belligerent blue bike shed” to give an idea where we stand in the grand scheme of things and to commemorate the many fruitful discussions we had during its development.

This release includes a very extensive number of changes, but some of the highlights are:

• Significant work to support at least decoding of all widespread mainstream proprietary codecs, such as:
  • decoders and encoders
    • ALAC
    • Flash Screen Video
    • WMAv2 decoder fixed, WMAv1/v2 encoder
  • decoders
    • Atrac3
    • MLP/TrueHD
    • On2 VP3 improvements and VP5/VP6 support
    • RealAudio Cooker and fixes for 14.4 and 28.8
    • RealVideo RV30/40
    • WMV3/WMV9/VC-1 and IntraX8 frame support for WMV2/VC-1
• Broad coverage of widespread non-proprietary codecs, including:
  • decoders and encoders
    • DNxHD
    • DVCPRO50 (a.k.a. DV50)
    • Floating point PCM
    • GSM-MS
    • Theora (and encoding via libtheora)
    • Vorbis
  • decoders
    • AAC with ADTS support and >2x the speed of FAAD! (no HE AAC support yet)
    • AC-3 that is faster than liba52 in 5.1, up to 2x faster in stereo and also supports E-AC-3! Hence liba52 is now obsolete.
    • DCA
    • DVCPRO HD (a.k.a. DV100)
    • H.264 PAFF and CQM support, plus slice-based multithreaded decoding
    • Monkey’s Audio
    • MPEG-2 video support for intra VLC and 4:2:2
    • Musepack
    • QCELP
    • Shorten
    • True Audio (TTA)
    • Wavpack including hybrid mode support
• Highlights among the newly supported container formats:
  • demuxers and muxers
    • GXF
    • MXF
  • demuxers
    • NullSoft Video (NSV)
  • muxers
    • iPhone/iPod compatibility for MP4/MOV
    • Matroska
    • NUT
    • Ogg (FLAC, Theora and Vorbis only)
    • ShockWave Flash (SWF)
• libavdevice
• ffserver is working again.
• a shiny, new, completely revamped, non-recursive build system
• cleaner, more consistent code
• an all new metadata API
• and so much more!

Note: At the time of posting the Release Notes and Changelog gave a 404. Small hickup?

Read the full article on Ars Technica.

Builds running on Linux, MacOS X and Windows (as XULRunner application). Lots of fun guaranteed!

You can find the release notes on the Mozilla project page

PS: GarageTV.be doesn’t look too bad using Fennic for Windows!

Not all users are convinced that Chrome is ready to be called “stable”.

Check out the official statement on the Google Chrome Releases blog. Don’t forget to read the comments!