in five years' time...

[temporance]

So let's try to guess where the world of codecs, containers and amateur PC video will be in five years time.

DVDs will be so cheap that Blockbuster will be struggling to stay afloat. CDs also, but most people will not be buying their music in a physical format by then. Movies will be available cheaply online - but I'm not sure of the format. It will be possible to order VoD movies to a clever set-top-box with a hard drive and DSL/cable-modem connection. So perhaps the format will be the one with the most hardware support (looks like this will be MPEG-4). Your set-top box will also download movies that it thinks you might like to watch (and it will do this via p2p networks, although you might still have to pay to activate the DRM.

So, I reckon MPEG-4 (DivX,xvid) will still be going strong. Chipsets and videocards supporting H.264 will becoming standard (and these will support all formats up to HDTV). But encoding H.264 at home will still be slower and not much better quality than xvid API9. Oh yes and open-source project hdot264 will have reached version 1.0

There will have been one or two huge lawsuits, probably involving Microsoft... this might kill a standard or two.

So, my guess doesn't give much away... but i'd love to hear yours