Heartland

Ladees and gentlemen

Tidying up my pc's desktop unused icon's last night it appears I have 3 different photo viewers, and gawd knows how many media players. Please recommend me some replacements, one of each and why. I'm just a regular common or garden user, don't need anything fancy.

What I would like -

a) Photo viewer/arranger/basic editor
b) Media player - as easy to use as Windows Mediaplayer 10 to rip and burn and stuff but without all the drm type nastiness. I actually like this to use, but it appears increasingly evil.
c) Your recommended "thing" i never knew I needed.

Free by the way please!

I bow in advance to your superior knowledge

ruffers wrote: a) Photo viewer/arranger/basic editor

Irfan View: Fast, easy to use, easy to configure and has loads more options than it's simple interface suggests. Love it.

ruffers wrote: b) Media player - as easy to use as Windows Mediaplayer 10 to rip and burn and stuff but without all the drm type nastiness. I actually like this to use, but it appears increasingly evil.

I use Nero to burn stuff, Winamp for audio and WMP10 for video. I have started using Winamp for video recently as this little toy allow me to control winamp from my phone via bluetooth, playlists and everything

ruffers wrote: c) Your recommended "thing" i never knew I needed.

I've already told you about Avant Browser

Best thing to rip stuff with is DbPowerAMP version 10 :

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/bin/dMC-r10.exe

Don't use version 11 (the current one) as you cannot rip to MP3.

Also if you do a search for Lame 3.96 as well and install the codec into the DbPowerAMP folder that has a Lame file you'll have the latest version of the codec to use as well. Version 10 uses 3.92.

For a FREE CD Burning program go here : http://www.cdburnerxp.se/

It's meant to be quite good, but of course not as good as Nero.

Media Player is of course Winamp, although if you look for WinAmp Classic and download the one with Realplayer support then you can play practically any format of video file you'll find on websites. There is a Quicktime one as well, but I had problems getting it to work with Firefox. I ended up downloading the full Quicktime Viewer from Apple.

Now for the things that you never knew you needed :

Autostitch :http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

Ever take those multiple shots to put together to make a panaroma shot? All the colours are different and jagged? This program will do it for you. It works amazingly well I've gotta say, and is very fast.

GAIM : http://gaim.sourceforge.net/

A good replacement for MSN Messenger, ICQ etc. You can log into multiple message programs at one time.

CellThree wrote: Now for the things that you never knew you needed :

Autostitch :http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

Canon's software does that for you. The camera even comes with a mode that helps you line up the shots. Pretty good results

ruffers wrote:b) Media player - as easy to use as Windows Mediaplayer 10 to rip and burn and stuff but without all the drm type nastiness.

http://www.digmind.com/customer_support/faq_all.html wrote:In order to turn off DRM on your Windows Media Player, please use the following steps:

1. In Windows Media Player, Click on the "Tools" tab at the top of the screen
2. From the Tools Tab, Click on the "Copy Music" Tab
3. From the Copy Music Screen, make sure that the box next to "Copy Protect Music" is not checked.

cheers Dan, I'd already done that. Call me paranoid but I always get the feeling it's doing something underhand

And thanks for all previous, keep them coming

Splendid pic hallucienate, and I now use avant on all machines from the previous discussion.

Cellthree, I think that's useful. I'll need to read it properly later when I can concentrate better as it first glance it's a bit beyond me...

ruffers wrote:Splendid pic hallucienate.

Which one? There are three different ones.

ruffers wrote:
Cellthree, I think that's useful. I'll need to read it properly later when I can concentrate better as it first glance it's a bit beyond me...

It's a lot more straight forward than it looks.
File, Open, select ALL the pictures then click open and it kinda gets on with it then opens the picture in your main picture editor.