Recently I’ve made a pleasant discovery: The KMPlayer. It’s not just another media player,but,in my opinion,very possibly the ONLY media player you will ever need.

How can I make such a bold claim?

The playback abilities are very impressive; It plays just about every video and audio format you’re likely to ever use (with its own internal codecs as standard, so no downloading messy codec packs!) and it’s very customizable. It can be skinned and a whole lot more (I tend to like the default skin anyway) with all key and mouse actions fully customizable.

It also has very good subtitle support, and a neat option to have the subtitles only show on the black bars, underneath your movie instead of over it. As far as audio goes, it has some features which are very directly infuenced by winamp such as the same kind of winamp options,playlist support and it’s even compatible with some winamp plug-ins! Audio streaming is supported too so you can listen to your favorite radio stations online.

It has a very extensive list of options which can be customized to your liking with just a little experimentation. I liked it so much, I uninstalled winamp and my dvd/media player. Maybe you will too? Let me know!

Check out the official forum where you can read more info and download the latest version.

Got a large movie collection you want to keep track of ? With Personal Video Database you’ll be able to do that quickly and easily. The well thought-out user interface and assorted database management functions make it simple to make and manage even large movie databases.

It has powerful filtering, grouping and sorting that will assist you in finding your movies in no time. The program is expandable with plugins and there is already a batch of plugins that come with with the program that can help you call up movie info from various Internet movie databases or other database types.

Another noteworthy features is Loan management, handy for keeping track of those movies you loan to friends and sometimes forget about!

All in all, it makes for a powerful and dependable relational database of your movies and the people related with them, such as actors, directors, etc. It seems to be well supported with an active forum, where the developer pays attention to users.

Oh yeah, its free too! You can get it from the homepage here.

WinFF is a graphical user interface for the popular command line video converter FFmpeg.

This effectively is just a front-end interface to make working with FFmpeg for converting video formats a lot easier than typing in a bunch of command line information. It runs FFmpeg for you. So, you just select your files, and, it takes care of the rest.

WinFF doesn’t actually convert any video files. It just runs FFmpeg. So this means that it will convert any video file that FFmpeg is able to convert. Therefore, if FFmpeg won’t convert the file, then WinFF won’t either. But its likely that you’ll be able to convert your format with these tools unless its a rare format.

You simply choose your file and select the settings you want it to be converted into such as file format, bitrate, framerate etc. No external codecs are needed and it comes with a variety of presets to make things even easier. It even supports multithreading for dual processors.

A nice feature is the ability to work with multiple files, for example, to convert multiple files of various formats into the same format, all at once.

So if you need a free way to convert video files this is well worth checking out! Homepage here.

If you’ve been looking for a powerful tool that can enable you to watch your Internet Tv shows and videos easily, then this might be the thing for you. It’s called Micro.

Micro allows you to download and watch your internet TV shows and Videos in one powerful application just like you watch your TV. It lets you watch big, high resolution videos one after another. It helps you to avoid tedious web videos and it’s so easy to use. Micro has a built-in Channel Guide in which new channels arrive daily. The latest version of Micro for Windows was released last week.

Interested? Go to http://www.getmiro.com/

Due to the widespread availability of fast Internet connections over the last few years, online video is everywhere these days. The thing about most online video is the quality. It’s usually not great, as its compressed to minimize file size, ensuring faster download times.

This is good enough in most cases, like when you just want to watch some short clips online, but what if you want to see longer, more high quality videos? Check out Vuse.com. Its a bit torrent based video site offering (completely legal) downloads of high definition video. They can do this due to partnerships with names such as the BBC, A&E, Showtime and others.

Producers can also upload movies and offer them for download for a fee. The site has a strong emphasis on community and users can create groups and connect with other like-minded people. So if you have a fast internet connection and want to check out some quality video content, its worth checking out.

Visit the homepage here.

Sooner or later a time comes when most of us need to convert a file between formats for one reason or another, usually because your particular program doesn’t support a particular format. Rather than hunting around for a file conversion program, there now exists quite a few sites for online file conversion and Youconvertit is certainly one of the better ones.

You have the option to choose between a very large variety of file formats. These include audio, document, image, video and archive file types. What’s cool about this particular service apart from the large range of file formats supported, is that you can add up to five files at a time for conversion. You can even add a url that links to a file online which you’d like to convert. It also provides an option for sending files to a recipients email address (again, up to five at a time).

As a slightly unrelated bonus but in keeping with the theme of conversion, they also offer unit conversion (distance,weight, etc)

It’s a site worth bookmarking, whether you find yourself needing to convert between file types regularly or just once in a while!

Check it out here.

Have you ever imagined being able to use your webcam in more than one application at a time? Yes, it’s possible with tools like Manycam. This is a program which makes this possible by splitting one video stream into several video streams. Sounding good? Well, give it a try, and choose Manycam virtual Webcam as the video source in your webcam applications. There are some features you can also add to the video stream by using Manycam, such as time, text and funny animations.

Manycam just got better with its latest update on march 13 with these latest features:

• Create, add and submit new pre-made ManyCam effects;
• New video source “Custom Desktop”;
• New “Drawing over video” effect;
• Additional features in “Text over video” effect: multiline input text, transparent background and text, color background;
• Gif files support in “Still Image” video resource;
• Pause, Stop buttons in Movie Source.

You can get more information on www.manycam.com

Fix8 is a free program for using with your webcam. It allows you to add in “special effects”. These consist of animated objects such as hats, etc, but can also consist of avatars. These follow your heads position so for example you can wear a virtual hat. The avatars face is controlled by your own facial movements. For example, if you wink, it winks, if your mouth moves, it’s mouth moves, etc.

This can lead to hours of enjoyment or just a few minutes, depending on how easily amused or creative you are I guess!

There’s a wide selection to choose from that come with the basic version, which is completely free, with the choice to upgrade if you feel like spending a little money at a later time. You can also record videos for you and your friend’s later amusement.

Sound interesting to you? All you need is your computer and webcam and to go here to see a video example and download it..

Nowadays its pretty easy to make simple videos to upload online to websites like YouTube, etc. A lot of people simply use Windows Media Maker as it does the basics well and is already included with Windows. VideoSpin is a similar free program that does the same sort of things as Windows Media Maker, but a few extra things too.

In use, it’s very similar indeed, you simply drag and drop your video clips or music to the timeline where you can arrange, cut, crop etc and you can also add transition effects. So far this is sounding very much like Windows Media Maker right? Thats very true, but in my opinion it has a much more attractive and user friendly interface/layout and unlike Windows Movie Maker, VideoSpin has a fairly good title editor. It also includes an option of uploading finished videos straight to YouTube.

To sum it up , it’s worth checking out if you want a change from Windows Media Maker, it’s like a much improved version with better text titling and a more user friendly interface. Check more info and download it here.

The MediaInfo Lite software is just a lighter version of the MediaInfo software in the sense that a number of the more complicated features from the software have been removed in order to decrease the resources on your computer that the program uses when it happens to run.  The core functionality remains within the MediaInfo Lite software however and therefore people that are looking for basic functionality in terms of their media files in a package that does not eat up their RAM need look no further than MediaInfo Lite.

The basic functionality of the software is simply the ability to analyze media files that are on your hard drive or are on any attached media that you happen to have.  This means that you can use MediaInfo Lite in conjunction with any media file in order to get the format of that file, the resolution that the file has if it is a video, the duration of the media file and a number of other pieces of essential information that will be required if you want to build and maintain an accurate listing of all your media files.

There is also extendable functionality through a shell for Windows Explorer, which allows you to gain that information about media files without having to actually go through the software.  When the shell is installed, you will get that information when you hover over the file with your pointer.

More information is available at http://www.codecguide.com/download_other.htm#mediainfo.