VLC - The Perfect Media Player

VLC is one of the smartest and the best available free media player. The first time i used VLC is for it's interesting feature of 'wallpaper video playback' as i saw my friend plays movie while he works with desktop items. VLC Media Player is an open-source and cross-platform media player which is by now in its 1.0.5 version and brings a new interface for both Windows and Free Platform, several enhancements in performance and stability, as well as enhanced support for new formats, and a better support for those which it already supported. It is extremely useful, from playing any media files to watching our favorite DVDs and it doesn't matter if files are stored on a  removable device or in our hard drive,VLC Media Player plays almost any format of audio and video. Surely this ability is the reason why over 50 million users downloaded it. Anyway, with VLC our satisfaction is guaranteed. Let's go through its features and capabilities.


Much more than basic playback features the program has been specializing more enhancement in media handling . This is clearly shown by the possibilities for adding subtitles and handle multiple audio tracks attached to a movie. This feature is indispensable when it comes to DVD playing. It can also handle DVD menus and chapters.VLC Media Player offers an endless list of features, including support for different audio and video formats. Its compatibility with all types of media files is based on the fact that VLC doesn't depends on codecs installed in the system while it brings its own set. Moreover, this versatile media player can also play ripped DVDs, stream media from the web or network, amazingly it is also able to help us fix our files if video and audio are desynchronized. 

VLC media player is available for free and is one reason which makes it popular and happening, the quality the media player, What VLC provides is really ace and even Real player doesn’t give such outstanding buffering of video and images. Besides being free, VideoLAN VLC Media Player has multilingual support, including more than 40 languages where we can change the interface language any time we want even if we have selected a determinate one during setup.

Among the new features, you’ll find the following:

• Instantaneous pausing
• Frame by frame playback
• Finer playback speed control
• New and fixed audio and video decoders
• On-the-fly recording for all media
• Timeshift for most media
• On the fly zip file decompression and browsing
• Support for DVB-S and ATSC cards on Windows
• Experimental Blu-Ray disc and AVCHD folder support
• New Blu-Ray Linear PCM decoder
• Customizable interface controls
• Global Hotkeys on Windows and Linux
• Controllable by multimedia keys on modern Apple keyboards (OS X only)
• Several new and improved decoders, demuxers, encoders, and other codec-related goodies

VLC's major highlight is the smooth support for over 100s of formats which includes 
Container formats


3GP, ASF, AVI, FLV, Matroska, Musical Instrument Digital Interface (.mid/.midi),QuickTime, MP4, Ogg, OGM, WAV, MPEG-2 (ES, PS, TS, PVA, MP3), AIFF, Raw audio, Raw DV, MXF, VOB.


Video formats


Cinepak, Dirac, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo 3, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo 3&4, Sorenson (thus enabling direct playback of the modified Sorenson H.263 encoded videos downloaded from YouTube), Theora, VC-1, VP5, VP6, WMV.
Subtitles
DVD, SVCD, DVB, OGM, SubStation Alpha, SubRip, Advanced SubStation Alpha, MPEG-4 Timed Text, Text file, Vobsub, MPL2, Teletext.


Audio formats


AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, DTS, DV Audio, XM, FLAC, MACE, Mod, MP3, PLS, QDM2/QDMC, RealAudio, Speex, Screamtracker 3/S3M, TTA, Vorbis, WavPack, WMA (WMA 1/2, WMA 3 partially)

In short, with the new interface, VLC has become more "usable", and improvements in performance are notable. Maybe VLC Media Player is not the only nor the best free media player, but one thing I can tell for sure, when it comes to performance issues with some heavy videos, you might want to give it a try. 

Download VLC Media Player 1.0.5 Free

Start Up Optimizer : Improve Booting Speed

Ever felt your system keeps down itself down in perfomence from time to time ? First two weeks when you brought it fresh it ran like a charm: smooth, fast, no errors. But as time passes by, it begins to slow down, booting nd shutting down takes forever. The causes are diverse, but one of them is the accumulation of startup items. And this aspect should not be neglected, especially if you bought your system with everything installed on it. The retailers often install their own softwares and, for marketing purposes, they install a myriad of applications you seldom use and most of them load at startup. These elements that deploy in the background once Windows is loaded often affect the performance of your computer.One way out of this is to build your own computer by assembling hardware components. However, its un practical unless you hav a profesional taste. So a niftier solution must be sought. This is not difficult and all you need to do is find a good startup manager to help you eliminate all the processes eating computer resources for nothing.

Startup Optimizer is a free solution in this sense, designed to reveal to you the programs and processes that load with your operating system and lead to an overall slowdown of your computer.The developer gave it a very user-friendly, intuitive interface that will give any user the much desired ease of use. Cyberlion Startup Optimizer will inspect programs loading at Windows startup and keeps your PC running faster, cleaner, and error-free. With a software database, Startup Optimizer provides useful information for known programs. You can remove harmful programs like spyware, virus, diallers, make your system healthier and maintain a higher degree of privacy. Startup Optimizer removes junk and obsolete programs, frees up RAM and increases your system performance. Startup optimizer allows to add, remove and edit list of startup programs efficiently, backup and restore them.
In the startup items window (the middle section of the application screen) there are the items loading with Windows. Here, you can see what exactly is slowing the boot or preventing the computer to shut down faster. Clicking on the items brings up the "Program Detail" window showing the name of the program (executable, in fact), the rating, its location on your computer and in the registry, as well as the peak memory usage. To make the identification easier, Startup Optimizer provides a quick link to Google search engine.

Of course, there are specialized websites presenting details about a certain process, but Startup Optimizer simply does not include any of them. A ProcessLibrary link would have been a much better aid for the matter. A very handy function of the application is "Backup". It allows the user to save different startup configurations and load them at any time. This way, you can load up different configurations and use them when you feel like dumping some startup items. You can create as many backups as you want and add as many items as you want in the list as the software will not object to it at all.

Features:
1. Checks for viruses, spyware, diallers in Windows startup configurations
2. Provide security rating and consultative information on the startup programs
3. More than 12000 known programs in our knowledge database
4. Add / delete / edit software entries from Windows startup list
5. Enable / disable programs to start at Windows startup
6. Automatically / manually backup startup configurations (which you can use later)
7. Restore startup configurations
8. Launch selected program
9. Kill a running software process
10. Checks for 'invalid' software file at system startup

The license of this windows utility software is Freeware and it'll get the job done and present the startup items and their place of residence (both command path in the Registry and their location on the hard disk).

Download Startup Optimizer 1.6 (1.09 MB)