My first "Wiki Wednesday"

Thanks to Karen at verbatim for turning me on to this one. It's easy to play.

Time to learn something!

1. Go to Wikipedia.
2. Click on "Random article" in the left-hand sidebar box.
3. Post it!

Did you ever wonder what Audio Video Standard (AVS) is? Me neither, and it sounds like you'll never need to unless you're looking for some Chinese DVD:

Audio Video Standard, or AVS, is a compression codec for digital audio and video.

Development of AVS was initiated by the government of the People's Republic of China.

(snip)

The dominant audio/video compression codecs, MPEG and VCEG, enjoy widespread use in consumer digital media devices, such as DVD players. Their usage requires Chinese manufacturers to pay substantial royalty fees to the mostly-foreign companies that hold patents on technology in those standards.

(snip)

AVS is currently expected to be approved for the Chinese high-definition successor to the Enhanced Versatile Disc.

Open source implementations of an AVS video decoder can be found in the OpenAVSlibavcodec library. The latter is integrated in some free video players like MPlayer, VLC or xine.

This is true randomness.