You may have heard Microsoft builded DivX and Xvid native support in Windows 7 along with native H.264 and AAC support. But that’s not all. In a presentation titled “Video Improvements In Windows 7” at WinHEC 2008, Microsoft also revealed new encoding and similarly transcoding capabilities in Windows 7. The new “Media Foundation” decoders are as follows,

In Windows 7, encoding is extended to widely adopted MPEG-4 and 3GPP standards with H.264 video and AAC audio encoders built in, on top of the WMV, WMA and MP3 encoders built-in to Vista today - after all, hardly anyone uses Windows Media outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. Speaking of which the Zune even supports H.264 and AAC natively.

Microsoft’s also building in some interesting transcoding (decoding and re-encoding from one format to another) technology in Windows 7 shell. That is, if you drag and drop a video from your desktop to your portable media player, the conversion will happen automatically. Microsoft also recognizes that software transcoding is less than ideal - a movie will usually take hours, so Windows 7 will also support a new breed of dedicated hardware transcoders which could ideally become a standard motherboard chipset feature. Here’s a particular one from Quartics.

Source:→ Long Zheng