You don't need a Weissman score to know that today's video encoders are incredibly good at what they do and will continue to get better as hardware power increases. So how exactly does an encoder, such as H.264, compress gigabytes of video into megabytes? It's complex, sure, but very explainable.

Windows 10 will support a much larger variety of video codecs and container formats, but until it arrives (and you make the decision to upgrade), you can install a shell extension in Windows 7 and 8 to get, at the very least, thumbnail previews in Explorer.

Mac: If you have an audio or video file that will only play in a certain player or will play video with no audio, Invisor is a utility that will display all of the media information about that file so you can figure out the problem.

Windows/Mac: DivX, the well-established maker of video codecs, offers a free web plug-in that decodes Flash video with graphics hardware acceleration. In some cases, especially on netbooks or slower machines, it may do the job better than Adobe's own tools.

If you grabbed the final release of Ubuntu 10.10 this weekend, you can now fill out its codec compatibility, software updates and DVD playback powers with the Medibuntu repositories, recently updated to support the latest Ubuntu release.

The newest generation netbooks sport a strong enough CPU/GPU combo to handle HD content, but millions of netbooks have a much lighter pairing that needs a little help. This guide will help get you stutter-free HD content on your netbook.