Useful Programs

[Jack_Tone]

"Play all your High Definition MPEG-2 and AVC/H.264 camcorder clips and movies, incredibly fast, smooth and without problems. You don't need any additional codecs. Download, install, watch. It takes about one second to start application and High Definition video playback"

Splash Lite




DownLoad Here: http://mirillis.com/splash.html

[Jism Jim]

Originally Posted by vcestone

I have been looking for a good disk backup program. I use Norton Ghost but I am looking for something fast and simple. All I want to do is if Windows blows up be able to boot from a CD and restore my PC from an External drive.

Do you have any suggestions?

Partition Saving is very good and reliable. I have used it many times and it has never failed on me.
It runs on DOS. The easiest way to use it is to download and burn Hiren's Boot Disk.

[knobby109]

There's a nice little program called OpenTarget which when installed allows you to right click on any program icon and go straight to the installation files.Not a thing you use every day but when you want it it saves a lot of searching.
http://simplyfree.site90.net/?p=1574&lang=ca

[smeg]

Originally Posted by haldane4

Anyone know a good free program for making custom DVD covers? Thanks.

I think your asking for dvd case covers, Give this a look and it's freeware too.

UnderCoverXP 1.23
http://download.cnet.com/UnderCoverX...-10790541.html

[Jism Jim]

A program like Myalbum can rename and renumber pictures in any order you put them.
It can also do a lot of other things, by the way.

[gadgeteer]

Originally Posted by CrimsonE

Does anyone know of a good program comparable to Imagegrabber II NET whereby I can do multiple screencaptures of avi and other video formats? Ideally, this program would be free. I loved Imagegrabber II NET but it does not appear to be compatible with Windows 7.

I was able to make the first Imagegrabber II work, but it is very limited in what it could do, particularly it would not allow for easy editing and deletion of the screens that did not work in a thumnail.

Get Jart's updated version:

http://sites.google.com/site/imagegrabber2/

Single-file mode does allow editing, adding frames, and time-sorting the layout before and the batch mode's solid - nearly perfect on > 4000 files so far for me, no crashes, and just 2 failed videos. People claiming it doesn't work usually are trying the old version still linked at many sites or have a bad codec & splitter installation.

[flipflop1]

One of the better utility software threads I have seen in awhile!

3 things I felt might be useful to some:

Other download apps for the rapidshares/meguploads etc. have been mentioned, but I tried "Jdownloader" for the first time a few weeks ago. It is pretty slick, and with the regular updates it seems to work fine (the recent rapid share issues caused a bit of an issue, but they fixed it)
Automates a lot of the work involved in the multiple files, and forgetting .rar passwords.
http://jdownloader.org/


Also a more standard download manager "Flashget" pretty fast, helps get files that are in sequence, and allows you all the bells and whistles of a typical download manager. Works with a lot of the upload sites well, and can be used in conjunction with Jdownloader to do the actual download. Firefox has an extension "flashgot" that integrates the two together VERY well.
http://www.flashget.com/index_en.html


Saw a few encrypting tools mentioned, and haven't tried any of them, but "TrueCrypt" I have been using for years and think it is as good or better than several of the pay for alternatives.

http://www.truecrypt.org/ (site is down right now 9/27 4 PM PST)

http://download.cnet.com/TrueCrypt/3...-10527243.html


Encryption on the fly (and with practically no noticeable performance hit), Encrypt your whole drive (boot drive or storage, thumb drive or external hard drive). Works very well, and very easy, also allows for separate encrypted "volumes" and you can choose to have those hidden or not. Supposed to be very hard hard to know they are even there if you didn't create them, but I cannot attest to that. I CAN attest that the average person and tech won't see them. If you are in the market for something along these lines, give this a shot, or read about it. Great simple and easy way to keep your data private.


Question:
MyAlbum looks a bit outdated, anything similar that is newer? Want a way to organize pictures and "tag" them as part of different sets etc. Help me search for more info than I would keep in the title, and browse through them etc. I guess more of a database for pictures. Would be nice if it was standalone/portable but not necessary.

[electile disfunction]

Originally Posted by lk_ie

Anyone know a good, free, duplicate pics detection program???? Thanks.

I am currently testing them for my needs and I am trying the 7th right now. (Although I agree with hos that eyes are best, there is only so much time in the day and I already have too many files ...)

The best so far--by a wide margin--is Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder (http://www.duplicate-finder.com/photo.html). It is free, it is wonderfully accurate, and it is extrememly fast compared to all others I've tried. It is only about a 1 MB download.

It has a few small shortfalls (like: it only supports JPG, BMP, GIF, and PNG; not all setting remain "set" between sessions; it doesn't keep a list of known non-duplicates; etc.) but these are more than made up for by its speed and ease of use.

For best results, also use a good image viewer like Irfanview (it's free, fast, and powerfull: http://www.irfanview.com/) installed, and remember that you can choose which directories to scan and ignore, and you can choose how to sort the results by clicking on the column-titles at the top of the results list.

If I find any other program similarly efficient that supports other file types (for free or otherwise) I'll keep you all posted!

e.d.

P.S. I use Irfanview in this case to rename, delete, and move duplicate files as it is easier than ADPF for this.

[keisari]

Also not just for pics is Clonespy, that I've used quite alot managing my too big movie collection which seems to be duplicating itself quite regularly.

http://www.clonespy.com/?Home

[redman231]

Originally Posted by electile disfunction

Has anyone else had a chance to try ADPF or any other visual similarity software? What kind of results did you have, please?

e.d.

Trying it now. I tried ~10 dupe detector programs years ago, and settled on 1 that was pretty good for speed/stability, and, if you happened to have 5 duplicates of 1 file, it would thumbnail all of them for comparison instead of just 2 at a time. Unfortunately, there are so many similar programs now that I can't find the one I liked!

So Far: ADPF is pretty fast: half way through a 25650 file scan in 21 minutes. I'd prefer it if they explained their detection methods, but free is free

I tend to use a non-image-specific scanning program every few weeks:
http://anonym.to/?http://www.digital...licate-cleaner
I may have found that program in this thread....can't remember. It only does file size/crc checks, but it's at least fast.
The benefit of this program: it has a cumbersome (yet effective) mass-selection section that allows the user to quickly select all dupes in a given folder. It's nice to wipe out a large number of dupes all at once before resorting to image-by-image comparisons with a "proper" image dupe detector.

So far, the search for a quality all-in-one solution continues, I guess.