[Web Pack] 318 Essential Collection: Digital Media
Each issue we’re going to be hunting down the best digital media applications available on the internet so you don’t have to. This could be anything from image manipulation to video editing, from audio compression to media management and everything in between. You name it, we’re likely to cover it. Best of all, everything you’ll find on this page will be freeware. So no nagging popups, no time restrictions and no feature limitations. Just strictly no holds barred functionality! Read on to find out what we’ve been digging during the last month.
XMBC NEW
XMBC is a powerful media centre interface for accessing your movie and music libaries. It will function perfectly well on any desktop system, but it’s main purpose is for serving content in the living room from a custom set top box. It’s designed to work smoothly with handset controllers, and operations feel swift througout the menus. Within XMBC you’ll discover the addition of custom Add-ons. Essentially mini-programs to bolt new functions within the media center itself. Anything from video/music feed browsers and RSS feeds to unexpected entries like the Gmail checker and MAME emulator frontend.
There are plenty of themes and plugins to customise the appearance and functionality of this media center hub
Machete Video Editor NEW
Machete is a video editor for simple trimming, and cutting and pasting jobs. The software doesn’t re-encode the edited video output, so it’s completely lossless. This Lite edition is limited to WMV and AVI video files only.
Hugin NEW
Hugin is a photo stitching program for building impressive panoramic images. The software automatically applies adjustments for distortions and overlapping images which makes the entire process quick and easy.
It's a one trick pony, but you won't find an easier way to seamlessly stitch together photos
Fusion NEW
Here is another interesting freebie for the aspiring prosumer photographer. Fusion merges multiple images taken at different exposures to produce a single stunning HDR image. You’ll require a suitable digital camera with adjustable exposure settings and of course a tripod to be able to capture identical images to make this all work.
DVDStyler NEW
DVDStyler is a complete DVD authoring application for creating professional looking DVD menus for your own movies. DVDStyler has the beginner in mind, using simple drag-and-drop controls for making menus and dropping movies into place. There’s support for several common video formats, and comes complete with ready to use templates. For the full custom look it’s just as easy to drop in your own background menu images.
Prism
The first of our conversion-wares this issue, Prism is essential software for those who use video files in any way. Converting a wide range of both formats and types is easy, with added functionality to apply filters, captions or brightness and contrast enhancements to the video in the process. Files can be called in individually, by folders and even directly from DVDs (note that Prism will not circumvent any copy protection on retail DVDs) and output in many formats, with several presets for each format and even mobile devices.
Yammm
Yet Another Media Meta Manager runs in the background to populate your stored movies and TV shows with accurate and relevant information, making it easier and more rewarding to browse in a media centre/HTPC environment. Monitoring folders for new media it will hunt down artwork along with metadata (information about the meida, such as director’s name, year of release, a brief synopsis etc) and can save automatically save playlists for playing back multiple file movies and TV series.
Get iPlayer
This a project that was born to enable BBC iPlayer users to watch TV on their own terms. Providing users respect a fair-use policy, this tool is effectively a modern-day version of a video cassette recorder! The initial set up can be a little tiresome, but once it’s done you have a browser-based PVR that can search, play and record BBC iPlayer content on demand. If nothing else, automatically saving programs that would otherwise be impossible to stream on a poor broadband connection make this well worth a try.
S.U.P.E.R.
Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer, or SUPER for short, is a more advanced encoder for video and audio that you’d normally come across in the free software world. It’s a completely modular product, with the GUI providing a front-end to the many bundled third-party command line convertors included. Format support is as universal as you could want, and an almost overwhelming number of precise encoding option tweaks. This makes the software suited to the higher end user where this amount of control is more important. If you just need a quick and dirty media conversion, there are plenty of other free alternatives that will be more appropriate.
Music Editor Free
Previously on sale for $29.99, this plainly named software is exactly what it says. Feature wise, Music Editor ticks all the boxes for sophisticated editing above and beyond basic cutting and pasting, such as tools for fading, adjusting loudness, audio enhancement, and several sound effects.
Posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2012 at 10:49 am under Digital Media, Web Packs. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: Issue 318, Photography, Utilities, Web Packs
