COMPUTER HARDWARE

Monday, August 31, 2009

WINRAR

There are plenty of solid compression utilities to choose from, but this shareware powerhouse offers the features and ease of use that place it at the top of the compression category. WinRAR is easy to use, lightweight, and flexible.
An intuitive interface lets you mouse over icons to see their functions, and if you don't like their candy-coated appearance, you can always choose from several themes at the developer's site. The Folder Tree Panel makes sifting through your directories to find files easier than ever. But once you see the size savings of a RAR archive, with a compression ratio of 8 percent to 15 percent better than the ZIP format, you'll understand why so many users and developers are making the switch from other apps. With virus scans now integrated and minor interface tweaks for Vista, only the slightly slower decompression speed holds the app back.
Beyond its good looks and right-click readiness for basic compression and unzipping, WinRAR offers unpacking support for a large number of archive formats, including TAR, ACE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, and ZIP. WinRAR's advanced features are icing on the cake, with Unicode support for international formatting, embedded file comments, damaged archive repair, archive locking, self-extracting archives, and easy encryption. There's also the option to automatically delete temporary files and just-archived files. Anyone seeking an all-in-one archiving solution would be remiss to not check out WinRAR.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

VLC PLAYER

VLC Media Player is a long-time open-source favorite, and the latest version is also the first to be out of beta development. It's not the only option for free video playback, but it's one of the best, and the feature updates in version 1 make it well worth the upgrade.
Users can now get frame-by-frame advancement, granular speed controls allowing for on-the-fly slower or faster playback, and live recording of streaming video. The toolbars are fully customizable, so you can have only the buttons you need in the interface, there's AirTunes streaming, and there's better integration in Gtk environments. Along with the improvements, VLC continues to offer robust support for a wide range of video and audio formats, including OGG, MP2, MP3, MP4, DivX, HD codecs like AES3, Raw Dirac, and even support for playing back zipped files.
The default interface is still a stripped down player that belies VLC's functionality and features. Skinning can fix that quickly, but behavior can still be a bit unpredictable depending on the quality of the skin. VLC's open-source foundation and community ensures that it evolves quickly and often, with new features and fixes released frequently. Overall, VLC Media Player is a must-have application for its ability to open just about any type of video file you throw at it.

MEDIA PLAYER CLASSIC

Media Player Classic looks just like Windows Media Player 6.4, but has many additional features. It has a built in DVD player with real-time zoom, support for AVI subtitles, QuickTime and RealVideo support (requires QuickTime and/or Real Player); built-in MPEG2/SVCD/DVD codec.

It also supports SVCD/CVD selectable subtitles and lots more. The best part about Media Player Classic is the ability to modify the filters when playing your favorite video files.

Media Player Classic mod designed for homecinema usage and released by Casimir666.

Fixed playlist shuffle

NEW: Support for Flac audio streams-

NEW: Support for Dolby Digital+ (Eac3) and Dolby true HD (MLP)-

NEW: Nellymoser audio decoder- NEW: Belarusian, Brazilian and Sweedish translation-

NEW: New shader "Sharpen Complex 2" (required hardware compatible with pixel shader 2.A)- NEW: Support for madVR video renderer

NEW: Additional information on video using MediaInfo (DLL can be download from

NEW: Internal DXVA decoder support for H264 with Intel G45 (thanks for people who help me at Intel Corp.)-

CHANGED: Add support of interlaced flags in software mode for MPCVideoDecoder filter- CHANGED: D3DFullScreen mode now takes into account the monitor to full-screen mode in options, if monitor is not specified on the command line.-

CHANGED: Auto-hide playlist on fullscreen

CHANGED: Detours library updated to v2.1- CHANGED: Support for AC3 in MP4 splitter- CHANGED: Support for EAc3 in Matroska splitter- CHANGED: Hotkeys added to support more remote control keys- CHANGED: Support for Theora in Matroska internal splitter-

CHANGED: LibVorbis updated to v1.2.3-

CHANGED: LibOgg updated to v1.1.4-

CHANGED: Improved streaming performances-

CHANGED: Prevent display or computer to sleep during playback-

CHANGED: Faad library updated to rev 2.2.7-

CHANGED: LibPNG updated to release 1.2.38

CHANGED: Playlist file is now saved in mpc folder

CHANGED: frame by frame modify to support step frame back functionality (except for VMR9) - CHANGED: support for AC3 in MP4 files created by Nero Digital-

CHANGED: EVR custom and VMR9 renderless revamped (Beliyaal), better synchronisation, remove tearing in windowed mode, support for dialog box in DirectX exclusive mode, ...-

FIXED: Support for Theora stream in Ogg internal splitter-

FIXED: Save thumbnails crash in x64-

FIXED: Bugs on presentation graphics (missing subtitles, better synchronization)-

FIXED: Audio change on M2TS files reset the selected subtitle-

FIXED: Switch to "Minimal view" reset main menu language to English-

FIXED: Bug in Mpeg splitter for VC1- FIXED: Maximum texture resolution to "Desktop" not working with Haali renderer

FIXED: Better synchronization with EVR custom to improve playback smoothness- FIXED: 24 bits LPCM not properly play

FIXED: Possible deadlock with Reclock

FIXED: Support of framestep backward, even if the codec didn't support it natively

FIXED: DXVA decoder support multiple graphics cards (PCI vendor id detection on the fly) FIXED: Incorrect aspect ratio for some H264 files with DXVA1 decoder (extended SAR)

FIXED: H264 files with 16 reference frames freeze during playback

FIXED: AVI with H264 not decoded properly

FIXED: Revamped DXVA h264 decoder based on new insights, fixing black screen, macroblock, support for AVI, ...-

FIXED: Incorrect playback for padded DTS- FIXED: Hang when moving player between monitors

DOWNLOADS

BLOGADDA

Followers

BLOGCATALOG

Software Blogs - BlogCatalog Blog Directory

VOTING BUTTON