Programs you couldn't live without or might not know about./ (1 Viewer)

[Kimmo Jaskari]

For people looking for a personal antispam solution, perhaps SpamBayes http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ might be an idea.

Bayesian filtering is great because it adapts to the user. Ideally, to get it to work decently out of the box, one should save mail for a while first - sort all spam into a folder and keep the good mail in another folder (could be the inbox.) Then, one installs SpamBayes and feeds it the good stuff and the bad stuff as something to build on and it will have a good baseline of what one likes and what one doesn't. You'll then continue marking things as either spam or ham (ham being the good mail) and the filter keeps learning and updating itself. I hear accuracy percentages in the high 90's mentioned, though I haven't had the opportunity to use it much (I get extremely little spam to my work account, and for personal stuff I use Gmail which filters nicely.)

The easiest way to use SpamBayes is if one uses Outlook, there is a nice plugin for it. Can be used with other programs, but it's not as nicely integrated then.

Article from 2003 about it. Since I haven't used it much I have no idea how well it works these days, but it stands to reason the underlying idea hasn't changed.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Nope, sorry. Drivers only, far as I know.

 

[Rommel_L]

AVG Free AntiVirus
AVG Free AntiSpyware
Microsoft Defender
Lavasoft Ad-Aware
Spybot Search & Destroy
Spyware Blaster
HiJack This
Cool Web Shredder
CCleaner
Belarc Advisor
CPU-Z
Jetico Personal Firewall

Mozilla Firefox
Open Office
Mozilla Thunderbird
Google Toolbar
Cablenut
Deep Burner

VLC media player
Audacity
Exact Audio Copy
CDex
TmpGenc **Parker: you might want to take a look at this...**

Lalim DVD player
DVD Decrypter
DVD Shrink
DVD Fab Decrypter
Vob Blanker
RipIt4Me
FixVTS

Wanna know what they are? Google is your friend...

 

[Parker Clack]

Rommel:

I looked into TmpGenc but it converts AVI to MPEG. What I am wanting to have is a program that will convert .mov files to .mpg. My digital camera will record small .mov files but I am wanting to convert those over to .mpg.

 

[Ken Cline]

DVD Decrypter - This has to be one of the best freeware progs ever. It's now defunct and has pretty much been replaced by DVD Fab Decrypter which is also good, but not very many options at all. It is always being updated though.

I use this as my 3 year old son likes to destroy DVDs - he shattered a brand new Kermit The Frog disc I bought for him. With this prog I can make copies of his/my discs. I also like to make backup copies of the most frequently viewed movies to my NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive which we can view on my IN72 projector or laptop or whatever.

DVD Shrink - This is second in line. What I love about DVD Shrink is I can strip out all the BS (trailers, messages, menus, extra audio tracks, etc.) and have just the movie - I don't want all that extra stuff when I back it up to the HD.

Foobar2000 - My favorite music player. It does (and plays) almost everything and it does it well. Out of the box it looks pretty boring, but this is the most flexibale and customizable player out there. It does take some patience on how to customize it though. There are tons of plugins for just about anything.

Norton Ghost - Norton used to be really good at almost everything, but something happened along the way. I dumped Norton System Works for better, and usually free software with less problems and better performance. Norton Ghost on the other hand is still very good for creating a backup image of your hard drive.

PowerStrip - I recently tried this and it works real good. I wanted to get a better image on my DLP projector with 1-to-1 pixel mapping and this prog does it. It does alot of other things I haven't even gotten to. It's a shareware program with a $29.95 if you want to buy.
http://entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm

 

[DaveF]

Try MPEG StreamClip

It should do exactly what you want. Assuming you want MPEG-2 output (and not MPEG-1), you must also purchase Apple QuickTime Pro ($20), or install QuickTime Alternative (free).

 

[Ken Chan]

Neither of those have an MPEG-2 or MPEG-1 encoder. Pro lets you export, but you don't need that if you have MPEG Streamclip. Apple sells an MPEG-2 Playback Component, but that doesn't encode either. The lowest-end MPEG-2 encoder they have is the one built into iDVD.

MPEG Streamclip does require either QuickTime Player (Pro or not) or QuickTime Alternative. You can export to MPEG-4. But that's not generally considered an ".mpg" file.

Parker, why do you want ".mpg" -- what are you going to do with it?

 

[DaveF]

Ken's right (and I mislead Parker): MPEG Streamclip can't output MPEG-2. It reads MPEG-2 files with such aplomb and does several other conversions so readily, that I assumed it could convert to MPEG-2 format.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

TMPGEnc will covert Quicktime files if you put this file (from this site) into the folder where you installed the program. Works with about 95% of Quicktime files.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

For disk images, a better alternative to Norton Ghost these days is most likely Acronis True Image.