Useful guides and tutorials related to codecs and multimedia.

A walk through the four stages every video passes through between double-click and picture, and how to tell which one is failing.

A plain-English explainer covering what RAW files hold, which format each camera brand uses, and what opens them on Windows.

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.

Current MPC-HC configures GPU decoding on its own, so this covers how to confirm it is running and how to set it manually when it is not.

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.

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

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.

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.