Free Video Player - Gom Player

Although there are thousands of video players out there, there are very few worth mentioning, the one I found a little while ago, Gom Player, definitely is.

Gom Player is a free multimedia player for Windows that will play virtually any file. It includes all the major codecs and will handilly direct you to a free version of any it happens to be missing (even though I have never experienced this). The great thing about Gom Player is that its free, lightweight and simple to use. Ok, sound a bit like VLC Player so what sets it apart?

There are a few features Gom has that are missing in VLC, the first major one is the ability to play playlists. You can queue up files to be played which saves you having to get up every time a short video ends. The other main distinguishing feature is its ability to play broken or incomplete files.

If you are half way through downloading a file and wanted to check its quality, or just have a damaged video file Gom's patented technology will quite happily play back any information it can find when other players will grumble and not even attempt to open the file.

Gom is definitely worth checking out and could well be a big competitor to VLC very soon, bring on a Mac version!

Gom Player


NB. upon writing this I have just noticed that Gom have released a free video encoder capable of many different formats. Although I havent tested this myself, if this is anywhere near as good as Gom Player it should be pretty special.

Remove Missing iTunes Files - Super Remove Dead Tracks

This is a really great script for the Mac that searches through your iTunes library and will delete all the entries that are missing ie. the ones that get a (!) next to them when you try to play them.

This can happen quite easily with iTunes as it has no 'Now Playing' playlist, anything it opens automatically gets added to the library. This can be quite annoying if you are just downloading simple clips from the net, playing them and then deleting them.

To use the script, simply download it from here: Super Remove Dead Tracks V2.1
open the disk image and copy the files to [username]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/, creating the Scripts folder if necessary.

You can then run it from the menu with the Script icon in iTunes and it will tell you how many tracks were removed if any once it has finished. As an added bonus it will also give you an update every 500 tracks it scans which could be useful if you have a big library.

Unfortunately there is no Windows alternative at the moment but there is a work-around available from here.

Super Remove Dead Tracks V2.1

Windows Waking From Sleep Issues

As I use my Windows PC mostly as a media centre, it is constantly waking itself up and going back to sleep again. While this is often necessary for tasks such as recording television programs, sometimes the wake times just don't make sense.

To find out what is causing your computer to wake you can use this command from a command prompt: "powercfg -lastwake" without the quotes. This will give you a simple explanation of what caused the computer to wake. Most of the time this will be due to a scheduled recording but can be due to a guide update, virus scan etc.

Once you have determined a wake cause that you don't think is necessary eg. a virus scanner waking your computer up to scan while you are trying to get to sleep, you can either look into that specific application and try to disable the wake or look into the Windows Task scheduler, possibly disabling some tasks from waking the computer if it is asleep.


To do this right click on your "My Computer" icon and click "Manage", you will need administrator privileges to make changes in here. From the left hand side expand System Tools->Task Scheduler->Task Scheduler Library->Microsoft->Windows to get a list of applications with scheduled tasks. Click on an application or service eg. Media Center to get a list of tasks at the top. Have a look in the triggers column to see if any tasks have scheduled times to run.

Click on a task then click "Properties" from the right hand panel to view more information and edit it if necessarry. If the task does not have to run at a specific time eg. guide update or virus scan you can either change the time, decide whether the task can wake the computer or simply wait until it is next on.

Be very careful when making changes here as certain tasks need to run to keep your system stable. Only change things that you are sure about!

Missing Dock Icons - Snow Leopard

I, like many people recently made the upgrade to Apple's new version of their operating system, Snow Leopard. While on the surface not much has changed (other than a few UI tweaks and bug fixes) its the under the hood features such as OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch that give this the possibility of being a great operating system once developers start utilising the new technologies.

Although many of you may have performed the upgrade option from your existing Leopard installation I opted for a completely clean install with a freshly formatted drive. While the installation process went very smoothly and was particularly fast, one of the problems I noticed upon start-up was a lot of the application icons were missing, just leaving blank spaces in the Dock, Finder and when switching applications with cmd+tab. This makes for very difficult navigation between applications.

Fortunately there was a easy fix for this. It just involves locating the "com.apple.dock.db" file in "~/Library/Preferences/" (where ~ is your homespace), deleting it and then restarting your computer. I moved it to the desktop just to keep a backup in case anything did go wrong, but just make sure you remove it from your preferences folder.

Once you have restarted, the dock icon database will be rebuilt, creating a fresh copy of the file in your preferences and hopefully all you icons will be back to normal!

Windows Printer Hosting - Access Your Windows Printer From Your Mac

This is a link to a really good set of instruction on how to get your Mac printing to a printer connected to a Windows machine on your network. I took a while looking at this as you should be able to do this through the OSX "Print & Fax" system preference pane. As I discovered however it is a little more involved.

You actually have to go through the Unix Printing System via a web browser. This tutorial makes the process very clear and you will have cross-platform wireless printing in no time.

Connecting to Shared Windows Printer In Leopard

Create Symbolic Link - Mac Automator Action

This is an automator action plug-in for OSX that allows you to easily create Symbolic Links to files or folders. Symbolic links are similar to aliases except that some applications such as the Create Clean Archive action will treat them as the actual file they point to. This can be useful when zipping folders that contain symbolic links as you do not need to keep multiple copies of the file on disk taking up a large amount of space.

My most used task for them however is to link to custom libraries when developing applications from within Xcode. This means I can have all my relevant SDK's and Libraries on a convenient place on disk eg. my Documents folder and then create a symbolic link to them and put it in the main include path in "/usr/include/". I can then link to that library in my project using the angled brackets notation which is a lot clearer and takes up less space eg. "#include ".

You will probably find more uses for symbolic links but will undoubtably find them very handy.

Create Symbolic Link 1.0

Disk Inventory X - Disk Usage Utility

This application allows you to view the size of files and folders on your hard drive in a graphical manner. Once scanned the contents of one or more of your disk drives (including removable drives) is shown in various sized blocks which are colour coded in relation to their file type.

This method of display can make it easy to track down large files or folders that you could delete to free up some much needed hard disk space. You can use the browser to delete files from within the application or open Finder windows to browse the directory.

This application is derived from a Linux utility called KDirStat. As such there are almost identical versions for Linux and Windows.

DiskInventoryX - Mac
WinDirstat - Windows
KDirStat - Linux

Quartz PDF - Inline PDF Viewer for Firefox

This is a Mac only extension to Firefox that allows you to view PDF documents directly within the browser. This is similar to the functionality that Adobe PDF Viewer adds on the PC but does not require an additional application installation.

Once installed this add-on will make any links to PDF files display just like any other webpage in Firefox. This means that you don't have to open Preview or another PDF reader to look at the files. This also save you from having a load of unnecessary files in your downloads folder.

The add-on is very fast and once a page is loaded there are options for you to adjust the zoom, number of pages displayed and also for saving and printing the document.

Quartz PDF

ImgBurn - Disk Burning Utility for Windows

If like me you have had problems with the built in CD/DVD burning support in Windows ImgBurn is a great alternative. It can support CD, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray and almost every kind of burning or ripping required.

ImgBurn supports reading and writing of a number of image formats for backing up discs. You can also build disc images and then burn them from files on your computer. There is also support for creating Audio CDs for playing in a stereo. There is also a good verification utility to check that data is being correctly written to the disks.

In addition to the various reading and writing modes available there is support for adding meta data to the disc. This can things such as volume identifiers and CD cue points.

This is a leightweight application and definately worth checking out.

ImgBurn

Virtual Box - Free Desktop Virtualistaion

You may have heard of desktop virtualization if you own a Mac and have looked at products such as Parallels or VMware Fusion. These products help you install and run another operating system within your existing one. For example I run a Windows XP virtual machine from my OS X Mac. Although this is similar to using Apple's boot camp, it enables both operating systems to be active at the same time. You can switch seamlessly form one to the other, or use both at the same time as well as having access to a whole hoast of other features.

Some of the things I use it for are:
-Streaming Windows Media DRM content
DRM content is not currently supported under OS X so it is useful for streaming videos such 4OD catch-up content.
-Platform specific applications
There are many applications written just for Windows and now Mac users can have access to these too. One big use is testing websites in Internet Explorer as this is still the most popular browser.
-Testing cross platform applications
If you develop applications and wish to make them cross platform you can now easily develop under one plaform and test in many. This obsiously has some restrictions but one possible use is for testing audio plug-ins such as VST's.

While I have never used VMware Fusion and not pushed Virtual Box to the limits yet, the initial performance is very good. Video streaming is much better than in Parallels and it seems to be less memory and CPU hungry providing a smoother experience even with my 2.0 GHz Intel processor. It also supports a wider range of both host and guest platforms than Parallels.

The application is not perfect yet and lacks a few useful fetures which rival products already incorporate such as dragging and dropping files from one OS to another and super smart keyboard controls such as using expose and spaces shortcuts when a guest window is active. However, these are all minor niggles and I'm sure they will be worked out soon.
You can work around these issues by mapping host folders as network drives (or even the whole disk if you wish) and relasing keyboard focus by pressing the command key once (in OS X).

The best thing about Virtual Box is the price, it is completely free, no trials, no restrictions, nothing. This means if you have an old Windows disk lying around or are interested in trying out some Linux distributions but don't want to reformat your hard drive now you can free of charge. You don't even have to worry about the VM's taking up massive ammounts of disk space with dynamic virtual disks.

I'm so glad there is now a free (and in my opinion better) alternative to Parallels and Fusion that I've already installed it on two of my friends computers (having only discovered it yesturday). Thanks a lot to Sun Microsystems who developed the product.

Virtual Box