"Shareaza" is a popular p2p program that supports multiple networks such as the gnutella network.

A few weeks ago, an "imposter" company ("Discordia") took over the Shareaza website and put up their own site, complete with fake software. They call the software "Shareaza v4" and even use the Shareaza logo.

Some fans of the real Shareaza wanted to try to take down the hijacked site - but then someone from the imposter Shareaza site actually threatened legal action against the real Shareaza team because of that.

I just read now that the people behind the fake Shareaza site are now trying to register the "Shareaza" trademark for themselves to prevent others from using it.

This page has links to multiple news sites reporting on the Shareaza hijacking:
http://www.shareazasecurity.be/forum/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=411

Here is the forum with many more posts regarding the Shareaza takeover:
http://www.shareazasecurity.be/forum/viewforum.php?f=46

Here is the official Shareaza site. The real Shareaza:
http://shareaza.sourceforge.net/

I just came across a really nice video for the Nintendo DS version of Final Fantasy IV.

When I first played the game when I was young, I felt pulled into the story more than any book, movie, or other video game ever made me feel.

While the original game certainly looks dated compared to what is out now, and the American version I played was slightly watered down compared to the original Japanese version, the Nintendo DS remake should take care of all that. It will make the game come alive like never before.

Spoken dialog, music with lyrics, full motion video, and a greatly expanded story will surely make this a treat.

The video is on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHl2lrj_6GQ

After getting my HDTV card, I've been messing with various MPEG2 decoders. HDTV broadcasts are MPEG2 streams.

Watching normal, low-resolution television on my computer has always used a lot of processing power. Software de-interlacers, software decoders, software filters, etc.

Many video cards support decoding an MPEG2 steam (used in digital TV) entirely in hardware, greatly reducing the workload on the system CPU. So the TV image is decoded quickly and de-interlaced perfectly without any impact on system performance. The image is better than regular TV and uses less resources than viewing regular TV.

The first MPEG2 decoder I used that offset the video decoding load to hardware was NVidia's PureVideo decoder. The cheapest version they offer is $20. I was able to download it and test it out - but found it would not work under Vista. At least, it wouldn't use my video hardware. It was entirely CPU based, which defeated the purpose of it. It seemed to work great under XP.

I read about CyberLink's PowerDVD having a hardware-accelerated decoder.
I downloaded and tried it out, and noticed it did install hardware accelerated decoders under Vista and XP. Not only that, it used even less system resources than NVidia's PureVideo decoder.

CyberLink offers "PowerDVD SE", a decoder-only release of PowerDVD. Since I didn't want the player, just the decoder, I thought this would be a good idea. Not only that, they charge just $15 for it, $5 less than what NVidia offers.

However, when I went to purchase the decoder, CyberLink mentioned a few strange things:

- SE for Vista *and* SE for XP. Listed as two separate products, each $15.
- Lists that it is only for Windows Media Player.

If the filters from the normal player install in XP or Vista, why are there two separate programs for just the filters? If I pay for the Vista one, will it just not work under XP?
Why would they only work under Windows Media Player? I don't even use WMP so that is useless to me.

Of course, until I find out what the deal is with their software, I will probably end up using the full PowerDVD Deluxe from my favorite torrent site.

CyberLink's own confusing wording and possibly mis-leading and/or incorrect information has prevented a sale of some of their software.