The NVIDIA proprietary drivers for Linux are now out of beta phase and into a stable version. The new generation includes a number of new features.

The nonprofit LinuxFund.org is providing financial support for Gnash, the Flash alternative, to accelerate development of the Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP).

Just a month after the release of Ubuntu 8.10, the first alpha of Ubuntu 9.04 has become available. The next distro version should boot more quickly, require less power, integrate more web services and include a backup solution.

Until recently, the Flash format has been the uncontested domain of Adobe. Gnash introduces a free Flash player for Linux and BSD with a design that aims far beyond the capabilities of Adobe’s king of the hill.

In times of YouTube and Co., a free video codec offers a good base for video enjoyment on the Internet -- independent from the interests of commercial providers. After a long development and some criticism, Ogg/Theora seems to be getting there. Yesterday saw the release of codec version 1.0, with Ogg in container format.

Linphone, the audio and video software for Internet telephony based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), includes extensive enhancements in its version 3.0.

For quite a while Ubuntu had been including example-content packages with its releases that contained the same content: some audio and video data to test the playback, including a video of Nelson Mandela.

Multimedia software MPlayer notifies of security holes in the Real demuxer code that can result in arbitrary code execution.