VLC Media Player, for instance, has our vote as the best audio and video player on Windows, Mac, and Linux (and for that matter BeOS and BSD). Aside from supporting standard audio and video formats including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG, DivX and AVI, it also handles proprietary formats such as RealVideo, WMA, WMV and QuickTime without touting for premium content sales, or plaguing you with irritating prompts to allow it to annexe all media types. Born from a student project at the Ecole Centrale in Paris, it ships with its own DVD decoder, which gives you full control of DVD content.
ImgBurn, the creation of "Lightning UK!" – author of the controversial DVD back-up tool DVD Decrypter – is a free lightweight CD/DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray burning application that does many of the things you'd have to pay for if you bought Nero. You can find it, and a vast selection of other worthwhile programs and resources for digital media, at doom9.net.
Terry Lane wrote last week about another of our personal favourites, IrfanView 4.10. Named for its Bosnian author, Irfan Skiljan, and pronounced "EarfanView", it's a great freeware image viewer and converter which includes some basic editing functions and effects. But users should also investigate its powerful plug-ins that can be downloaded separately from the site. It's also worth checking out the "Nice WWW links" section on the site, because it's Irfan's own show and tell.
One program we picked up from the PC Helpdesk discussion is the shareware multitrack recording and audio editing program Reaper. Given its features – which you can get some perspective on from a professional's review – it represents astonishing value at $US50 for non-commercial use. It comes in versions for Windows and Mac.
SnagIt 8.2 isn't just the best way of taking a snapshot of anything on your screen – from a particular window, including error messages, to an entire Web page, even if it happens to be scrolling – it also includes an image editor which allows you to add arrows and highlights etc. You can also direct the screen capture to several popular blog-editing programs including TypePad, Movable Type, Live Journal and WordPress.
Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder v2.0 is a freeware utility that retrieves the product keys used to install Microsoft Windows, Micorosoft Office and some other popular applications, and save them to a text file or print out for safekeeping, just in case you lose the original discs – a happenstance which Bleeding Edge has become quite expert at. We firmly believe every Windows users should run this program, and possibly laminate the print copy.
MediaMonkey does a better job than iTunes of managing large music libraries, and synching them with your portable player.
We've grown particularly fond of the iGoogle home page, which you can try at iGoogle.com. It allows you to add various content "gadgets", including local weather, The Age News Headlines, Google Calendar, ABC news, your horoscope, a quote of the day from Albert Einstein, a PacMan game perhaps to your browser entry point. To arrange it all, you could also try the Compound gadget.
Unfortunately, we couldn't find a gadget that can run a Show and Tell session, but no doubt some reader, somewhere, has one.