Have been working lately with many Audio/Video editing/authoring tools. Just thought that I will name them here so that It might be useful for someone.
All these tools that I will be discussing here will be either freeware/open sourced unless mentioned otherwise.
1) Authoring a DVD
Have you ever wanted to make a DVD out of the video’s you got from your camera or from a clip on the internet?
DVD Flick is the best that is out there for the purpose. It supports over 45 video formats. Its easy to add video titles, chapters, subtitles and organise them. Also allows you to create the DVD menu – All with a easy-to-use and simple interface. Here’s a quick guide on their website. Its a project on the sourceforge.net
2) Burning CDs/DVD
Burnatonce is a nice tool to quickly burn iso/cue/bin images into CDs/DVDs. It doesn’t have a complicated interface or several options which we won’t ever use.
3) Creating Xvid movies from DVD-Rip
It would be nice to have movies of size 700Mb (1 CD) ripped out from a DVD movie which is of size 4.5 GB normally. That would save a lot of space on your drives and you do not want to lose much on the quality of the Video also.
Auto Gordian Knot shortly known as AutoGK is the best free tool to convert your DVD’s into XVid movies (AVI format). You can choose from the standard size of 700Mb (1 CD) or 1400Mb (2 CDs) or even you can specify your own size.
But I must warn you, the process takes several hours. I would recommend you to create jobs and run them over the night.
4) Video Converter
Sometime or other we want to convert our video files from one format to another. It would be nice to have a single software to manage all of these.
Any Video Converter Free supports several input formats like avi, vob, flv, mpg and even the youtube video’s. The video’s can be converted into one of these formats: avi, mp4, wmv, swf, flv, mkv, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, mpg (PAL or NTSC), mp3, wma, ogg, aac, wave, m4a.
I was surprised to find that using this software, I can easily extract the soundtracks from the movie too, into a mp3 file.
The free version does not have any limits on the functionality, while the professional version promises more features.
5) MP3 Cutter
We might need to cut a single large mp3 into several files so that It can be used as a ringtone or be transferred to our handheld devices.
MP3 Splitter allows you to take a large MP3 and break it into user defined, smaller pieces. Users may split by size, into specified pieces. Its again a project on the sourceforge.net
6) Creating/Editing Subtitles
I like to see subtitles for every movie I watch. You can get subtitles for most video’s from the Open Subtitles Database.
But sometimes it is annoying when the subtitles don’t sync up with the video. In such cases you will have to edit the subtitles to sync with the timing of the video.
Or you might want to create a transcript of your favourite video/movie. Well, Visual Sub Sync is a pretty good tool to do this. I found it easy to use within minutes. Its on the sourceforge.net
Subtitle Workshop is another popular tool for editing subtitles. You can try that too. But personally I prefer Visual Sub Sync.
7) Video Cutter
I used to cut scenes/songs from a movie. Free fast Mpeg Cut is a lossless MPEG video editor that lets you cut unwanted parts from MPEG video files without re-encoding. And "without re-encoding" means without loosing original quality!!! Its fast, free and safe.
AimOneSoft has several products for converting, cutting, ripping and joining videos. You can try those too.
8.) Lyrics Viewer
I don’t know about you, but good lyrics always captures me as does a good music. And sometimes I used to watch the lyrics as I listen to the music.
Mini Lyrics by CrintSoft is the best ever lyrics viewer that supports a whole lot of players including J.River Media Jukebox (my favourite one), winamp, windows mediaplayer, and VLC player.
With MiniLyrics, you can easily create your own lyrics file (.lrc) and also can get various user submitted lyrics from the Lyrics Database online. The UI is so cool and has several options for you to customize the look and feel. Check it out today!
9) Media player
Many would have known about the VLC Player (The cross-platform open-source multimedia framework, player and server) that supports almost all of the media formats. Its one of the must-have software’s.
Recently I tried KM Player and voilà, its my favourite player now. Its a closed source freeware. I believe it was primarily developed for Linux. But now they have versions for Windows too. And it rocks. (I especially like the volume control on the mouse wheel and the pause/play control on mouse click.) KM Player comes with several features and customizable options that’s worth checking out!
For playing Audio I use J.River media Jukebox. It is very easy to organise your music, playlists. Supports tagging of MP3 files based on Properties and Vice versa in batch.
10) Media Center
I wanted a media organiser software that lists all my video files probably as thumbnails and grouped by album and artist. XBMC is “The Best”!! I’ve been wanting to write a separate post on XBMC for a long time now. I will post that soon in the coming weeks.
Samjosh
:. Samjosh | Random Thoughts .: 