Useful guides and tutorials related to codecs and multimedia.

The story of how camera manufacturers handed Windows RAW support to Microsoft, and what to install now that they have.

The current MakeMKV beta key, how long it lasts, and what to do on the day it stops working.

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

Which Windows video renderer to use, what changing one actually fixes, and why stuttering is never the renderer's fault.

H.264, HEVC, VP9 and AV1 measured on compression, browser support and hardware decode, with the licensing question answered honestly.

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.

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.

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.

A tour of every Microsoft PowerToys utility for Windows 10 and 11, which four to enable first, and the ones that earn their place in a media workflow.