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These come in very handy for playing different formats of multimedia, conversion of many different formats such as DVD, AVI, MOV, WMV, and damn near anything else you can imagine.

These are not only my personal recommendations after years of trial and error, but I’ve also included recommendations by many others. This is an excellent list and I intend on updating it with newer items later. Please feel free to comment if you have any additions to the list.

See the entire article for links and descriptions.

* = My personal recommendation.

AutoGK* - DivX / XviD backup utility. Support for DVD, MPEG2 (such as DVB captures and transport streams), MPEG1 sources, along with AVI/DV sources.

DVDShrink* - Backup your DVD disks. You can use this software in conjunction with DVD burning software of your choice to make a backup copy of any DVD or create a DVD image.

GOMPlayer* - GOM Player supports most popular codecs (AVI, DAT, MPEG, DivX plus many more) with its own embedded codec system that you won’t have to look for appropriate codecs every time. It also supports FLV files (for example: saved YouTube videos) and does the best job of any FLV player I’ve found. It’s hard to find a good FLV player, because most have lots of issues and will not allow you to maximize/resize the video.

VirtualDub* - Video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.

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You have seen those advertisements on television boasting amazing speed increases for dial-up Internet, or those saying that Cable or DSL is faster. What is the truth? Those claiming to increase dial-up speeds are nothing short of a lie. I’m going to explain the truth, facts and lies that you have been told about both dial-up and broadband.

LIE: The 56KBps modem

It is a 56Kbps modem and is capable of 56Kbps speeds, but dial-up connections are limited to 53Kbps due to a limit imposed on phone lines. A DSL connection uses the phone lines, but is not subject to the same limit. When you buy a 56Kbps modem, you are actually buying a modem which will connect you at 53Kbps or less.

Most actual ISP connections are between 36Kbps and 48Kbps according to what I saw in my time working for an internet service provider. It requires near ideal conditions to connect and transfer files at 53KBps.

At 48Kbps it would take you about 10-15 minutes to download a single three minute song. If you want to watch a YouTube video, you might as well click and go have lunch while the video loads. One of the major benefits of broadband is that the connections are so fast that you can watch streaming videos almost instantly with no interruption.
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