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!