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VLC – Audio and Video player

No user can be without VLC, the Video Lan Client, an open source free media player (yes, completely free).

Unlike pretty much any other media player, VLC can play almost any audio or video format (yes even Real, Quicktime and Flash FLV) straight away including DVD’s without requiring third party or commercial codec’s (to read various non-standard compression formats). Its interface is not quite as slick as the latest Windows Media Player, PowerDVD, Plex or iTunes but it is not trying to be, it just works. It will happily play direct from disc or file as well as digital streaming media (including DVB-T television). It can play VOB files (from ripped DVD’s), as well as the newer high definition formats such as M2TS and MKV files.

A useful side effect of installing VLC is the installation of an MPEG2 codec which will then allow Windows Media Player to play DVD’s.

Unfortunately the version for the iPad (still free) is not as stable as the version for normal PC’s. I have found that it crashes (locks up) quite regularly (every 6-8 minutes), far to often to be a useful media player when offline. Development for the iPad may not continue due to the iTunes store licencing requirements conflicting with the Open source GNU licence VLC is developed under.

It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux from http://www.videolan.org/

Posted in: Free Software

Infrarecorder – CD/DVD Burning

Infrarecorder is a free and open source CD/DVD burning solution that can cover all burning requirements, often better than the restricted OEM software that accompanies PC’s or burning hardware. It is very simple to use and can be downloaded from http://infrarecorder.org/. Hardware support is great, it is rare that it cannot find and use a burner. It supports many plugins to allow burning from and ripping to different audio formats such as MP3 (Lame Codec).

Posted in: Free Software
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Paint.NET

Paint.NET started as a Microsoft sponsored university project to develop a replacement for the generally useless MS Paint. It was not used for this and has been developed further and is now available for free download from www.getpaint.net . It is able to do most basic image manipulation and is far more powerful than its 3 MB download suggests (it does require the MS dot NET framework). It is, however, Windows only. I use this app all the time and it is rare that I need something else for general photo and graphics work.

Another (and more powerful if not easier to use) image manipulation program that is cross platform and open source is GIMP.

Posted in: Free Software