Top 15 Open Source Items (For Windows)

I decided to let you know what my top 15 open source items are for Windows computers. All of the items below are free, both in the monetary sense and the intellectual property sense.

Only programs that I use or have used are in this list. I’m sure there are plenty of great programs not in this list, but I believe this list will suit the various needs of most Windows users. (I have excluded PuTTY, as it is a program intended for use by a small group of users — those with Linux/Unix servers.)

15. Handbrake

This is an excellent program for backing up (a.k.a. “ripping”) DVD’s, converting them to formats like H.264 MPEG4 for playback on computers. Leo Laporte has recommended this program to many callers on The Lab With Leo Laporte, but it may not be legal much longer if the proposed copyright reform in Canada is passed. From what I can tell, it is a powerful program.

This program is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

14. PDFCreator

I used to use this for converting any printable document to PDF, but now I have Office 2007 which has built-in PDF capabilities. I no longer have a need for this open source solution. Mac users, of course, can convert to PDF in a simple fashion when printing. With PDFCreator, it leverages other GPL/LGPL things like ghostscript in order to convert whatever you’re printing to PDF. There are commercial and non-open source solutions, but this is by far the best of them — aside from Adobe Acrobat.

13. Pidgin

This is a good instant messenger that consolidates multiple IM accounts from Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo! and more. It doesn’t look as intuitive as a free (but closed source) product like Windows Live Messenger or Google Talk, but it is a powerful application. I used to use this before I found out how to install Windows Live Messenger on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

Other notable IM clients for Windows include Miranda IM.

12. DVD Flick

DVD Flick is a really good program that creates DVD’s that can be played in most modern DVD players. It doesn’t match up to iDVD on the Mac — it only converts the video/audio to the DVD standard format and creates titles & chapters — but it is an easy-to-use solution for average Windows users that don’t need a menu. There is another open source solution for menu authoring, though.

11. Notepad++

Notepad++ is an interesting program that is so much more than a Notepad replacement. It can even replace some coding programs, given the plugins available for it and code highlighting, even though I think Dreamweaver still beats it in terms of usability and user-friendliness for Web designers and developers.

I would appreciate the authors of Notepad++ more if they didn’t have a large, ugly, and ineffective banner at the top of their site advocating the boycott of the Beijing Games. Guess what? Not a single country decided to boycott the Games! But that’s a matter for another time and another blog…

10 more programs after the jump, including (in no particular order here) Firefox, 7-zip, VLC Media Player, Audacity, MediaCoder, and more!

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(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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LifeSize Communications

I talked about H.264 a while ago as a great standard for distributing high-quality video. Would you be surprised to find that H.264 is also used for high-definition video conferencing?

LifeSize Communications provides interesting solutions for businesses and all sorts of organizations, from international NGO’s, to governmental agencies. The ability to communicate is important; the ability to see each other in LifeSize is a luxury, made possible by their telepresence solutions. Long-distance communication is so much more effective when everyone can see the others’ gestures, facial expressions, and body language.

Let’s talk more about the video. In October of last year, LifeSize Communications “rocked the high definition conferencing world” when they released a 720p product, allowing for high-definition telepresence on a typical broadband connection. The resolution is 1280×720, and amazingly, 30 fps. Typical (competing) video conferencing solutions are simply webcam quality; they aren’t well suited to a business environment or one in which the appearance of face-to-face communication is essential. LifeSize products lets you meet with the illusion of life-sized participants!

These are great solutions for any small business, enterprise, or organization. The best video conferencing solutions around!

Brought to you by our sponsors at LifeSize Communications.

(5 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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Use H.264 for videos

I’m going to categorize this under “Technology”, since I don’t have a section on Geekie.org dedicated exclusively to multimedia.

H.264 is a really good video compression standard. It’s also known as MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding. You can read more about the technical details on Wikipedia.

The benefit of H.264 is that the resulting output files are substantially smaller as a result of significantly reduced (low) bitrates. Yet, H.264 is able to do so without sacrificing image quality; the output video quality is often comparable to an uncompressed AVI. Trials have shown that H.264 outperforms DivX and Xvid, in terms of quality, thanks to the new features in MPEG-4 Part 10.

Apple QuickTime is one of the major video players (and encoders) which supports H.264 and is proud of it. Their page about H.264 has the following description:

H.264 uses the latest innovations in video compression technology to provide incredible video quality from the smallest amount of video data. This means you see crisp, clear video in much smaller files, saving you bandwidth and storage costs over previous generations of video codecs. H.264 delivers the same quality as MPEG-2 at a third to half the data rate and up to four times the frame size of MPEG-4 Part 2 at the same data rate. H.264 is truly a sight to behold.

Standard definition video (ie. 640×480) is imperceptibly encoded to only 1 to 2 mbps, while maintaining the same degree of quality. HD support also exists, at amazingly low bitrates (comparatively).

Unfortunately, Microsoft isn’t embracing H.264 in the same way, and neither Windows Media Player nor Microsoft Silverlight (at the time of writing) support H.264 or MPEG-4 Video. They have chosen, instead, to create “Microsoft MPEG-4″, a semi-proprietary implementation of an open standard. Shame!

If you want to distribute H.264 media, the best containers are MP4 (MPEG-4 Video), MOV (Apple QuickTime Movie), and very recently, FLV (Adobe Flash Video). Each of them can carry a H.264 stream. For instance, here is a QuickTime Movie encoded with H.264.

Software that can be used to create H.264-encoded video include:

• Apple QuickTime Pro and other programs like Camtasia which use the QuickTime toolkit
  
• MediaCoder (free and open source!), using the x264 library (also free and open source!)

You, too, can create high quality H.264 videos. Read Apple’s instructions (for QuickTime Pro) or blip.tv’s how-to. (Did I recommend blip.tv as a place to upload your videos? It’s really good.)

(2 votes, average: 3.5 out of 5)

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Downloading YouTube files

How to download YouTube videos without installing any software, even when the entire YouTube domain is blocked

There is a simple process, one which results in a downloadable video file. Every step of the way, if you find that you can access the video you want, there is no need to complete the process unless you want to actually download a video that you can store and keep on your own (or school/corporate) computer.

Here is a scenario in which you might want to follow this guide:

You are on a corporate network which blocks YouTube and all of its subdomains. Any time that you attempt to access it, you receive a warning screen.

You cannot use proxies because anoonymizers have been blocked as well.

You know the URL of the video you want to watch or download.

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Zune comes to Canada

According to a report coming from CES 2008, Microsoft will release the Zune in Canada this spring. It is presented as an iPod alternative and Microsoft’s integrated portable multimedia device.

My first reaction is, so what? People can get the Zune in the U.S. and bring it over the border.

But the Zune just isn’t what people are looking for.

Two points I have to make: stick with software, and you should have done it earlier.

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