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Where are such tools? If I knew such things existed, I would have experimented in "bricking" some of my machines YEARS ago

Well there is UNIFLASH with source code. Then there are the likes of CBROM and AMIBCP to modify BIOS images and remove and add/enable drivers, functionality and boot screen graphics. Here and here are good places for info and tools.

You do know it's typically a Bad Idea to swap cards, chips, memory, etc. while a computer* is running, right? That's what makes his success noteworthy.

This is not all that uncommon a procedure though. I've done this with some old boards. I tend to use the machines I find on the street for swapping live EEPROMS though.

Once I accidentally put an EEPROM back in the wrong way around (unforgivable with my electronics background) and the little plastic sticker which normally would cover the window (which was not actually there on this chip) blistered from the heat almost instantly. I switched it off real quick, the chip was unbearably hot to touch, but once it cooled down and I placed it the correct way around, it worked fine to my complete astonishment!

I wasn't too worried because I have a tendency to take the EEPROM chips off dead mobos, to have spares for a rainy day.

I thought it was pretty cool when I first performed a live EEPROM swap and burn and have it actually work to resurrect a board. It also meant that I was able to feel a lot more confident modifying AWARD modular BIOS with driver removals and additions.

At the moment my BIOS woes include trying to get a replacement BIOS for my expensive Sony VAIO VGN-A49GP, because it has very few options and seemingly ACPI issues which I would like to just remedy or disable with a BIOS upgrade. I'm being a lot more cautious with this one though. ; ) AMI supposedly sell BIOS upgrades but they have not returned my emails. Flashing a $5,000 AU Sony laptop with a non-Sony firmware is a little scarey to say the least.

Note that skype, while a cooky closed-source, non-standard product, does have good support for using it behind NAT, which is harder with SIP.

A VOIP protocol that plays nice with NAT would be a beautiful thing. Asterisk's native AIX protocol will go through NAT but I'm not aware of anything else using it, and there's a patch for H323, but nothing for SIP :-(.

Foobar 2000 for all your audio needs.
BSPlayer for all your video needs.
Koepi's codec pack for all your codec needs.

or this one here link since it blocks the wrong referrer.

Since I lost all my data, I switched to another installer system. (Since XviD-1.0-RC1.)

If you used the old NSIS installer (builds _before_ 1.0-RC1), please uninstall it manually before upgrading with these new installers. If you have done that already, upgrading with these new installers works like you expect it.

Also, Win9x support is better now with this installer.

Moderators, mod the parent down! "Insightful", should be changed to "wrong" as there are binaries of XVID available.

You can get Windows Binaries Here. If you notice, they provide no binaries for any operating system on their website. There is probably some legal reasons for this. The LAME MP3 encoder also provides no Windows Binaries on their site, yet LAME is a very popular MP3 encoder simply because it is superior to the commercial ones.

That's why Xvid.org doesn't release binaries. There is something somewhere that states that you can't compile it unless you have a licence for Mpeg-4. So, they release the source and expect you to compile it. That's also why sites like this exist, where you can get binaries.

For Windows users, grab a compiled binary of XviD 1.0 Final with a nice installer at Koepi's Media Development Homepage. A lot easier than going through xvid.org as due to copyright issues they only host the xvid source, which must be compiled manually.

if you just want to download a codec so you can play movies (eg, with wmp) , go here.

(i use mplayer for win32 now, so i don't use this anymore)

it is compiled in the great multiplatform media player VLC.

I have had some success playing DivX 5 clips using XviD. Binary builds here.

If that doesn't work, I recommend getting the free version of DivX 5. So far haven't needed it though...

I'm sorry to say that I've yet to find a really satisfactory and impartial comparison, much less, one that is up to date. I've had to do all of my own testing to figure out what settings do, and how codecs compare. Mainly xvid, divx4/5, sbc, and ffvfw. As I stated earlier, I've found xvid in it's latest incarnations(Koepi and Umaniac's versions are easy to find, and work great, in my experience) are the best, and the doom9 xvid forum is a great place to give feedback to, and get information from, the creators of this robust and customizeable codec.

This is probably the closest thing I could find to an impartial comparison, displaying unpostprocessed, and postprocessed images from many different codecs. Unfortunately, when I tried the link, it didn't respond, hopefully it will be back up.

Hope it helps.

And you know, that is actually very few people on Windows...

Well, some of the people who can do so are sharing their work.

DivX 4.12 comes rather close to being MPEG-4 compliant, but I'd personally recommend XviD which is a GPL'ed implementation of MPEG-4. As such, there are some licensing issues, but it is probably the best MPEG-4 codec there is. DivX 3.11 is really good, but there are serious legal issues as well as future compatibility problems. There might be made a program that can convert DivX 3.11 AVI files to ISO MPEG-4 though. Read about that here. Here are a few quick URLs:

Doom9. The site about MPEG-4 encoding (and SVCDs and DVD-ripping).
Koepi's XviD site. Has binaries. Be gentle on the server folks... we don't want it slashdotted.

Doom9 also has a quick tutorial to make XviD do as you want. It's probably not optimal, but it ought to guarantee that you don't end up with a piece of crap.