Freeware

Virtual Dimension

You are using too many softwares running at the same time and you feel that you need a bigger monitor. Well before buy that new monitor, you might want to try Virtual Dimension first. This is a SourceForge hosted free GPL licensed virtual desktop manager. You can manage multiple virtual screens as many as you want .

Actually Virtual Dimension gives you full control over the how to manage and process applications, I was just surprised and never use any other virtual desktop manager.

Some of the nice things that you can with Virtual Dimension are

You can move application around between virtual desktop so easily by moving the icon from one desktop to another
You can easily make the application to show in all desktop by right click on the icon and click on “All desktops” menu. For some applications, like application launcher, you will need to access from all desktops.
It comes with a very nice transparency function. You make the windows transparent! By using the short cut key, you can easily turn on and off the transparency. Or you can save the settings so it is transparent whenever you execute the application. So great!

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I have been searching for some good free video format converters for a while. I have actually installed and tried in my desktop PC. The results were astonishing! Some of them do work better than the commercial ones.

Most of them are based on the FFmpeg LGPL software and other open source utilities. FFmpeg is a great piece of software, but it contains only console commands and does not come with any fancy Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). Basically these freewares that I will initroduce act as a the front GUI for FFmpeg. So FFmpeg is not for a casual innocent PC user.

I tried several freewares. Some are worthless to mention and some are very nice. There are the three finalists.

MediaCoder

This is probaly the most powerful video format converter with the every options that you will ever need.
You can drag and drop the source files just like Any Video Converter. And you can play around with the option contol in the lower pane. Note that it shows nice little summery of the output file format and expected size if you click on the ‘Summery’ tab. When you’re done with changing the options, you click on the ‘Start’ Button to execute the conversion. The output file will be created in the same folder where the original source file is located by default.

Here is the description from the website.

MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding in all time and at this moment, it already has millions of users from 170+ countries all over the planet.

And Here are the supported formats ( * supported as input only)

MP3, Vorbis, AAC, AAC+, AAC+v2, MusePack, Speex, AMR, WMA, RealAudio, mp3PRO*
FLAC, WavPack, Monkey’s Audio, OptimFrog, AAC Lossless, TTA, WAV/PCM, Waveform
H.264, XviD, DivX, MPEG 1/2/4, Theora, Flash Video, Dirac, 3ivx*, RealVideo*, Windows Media Video
AVI, MPEG/VOB, Matroska, MP4, PMP, RealMedia*, ASF, Quicktime*, OGM*
CD, DVD, VCD, SVCD, CUESheet*, HTTP*, FTP*, RTSP*, UDP*

When I tried to convert wmv to avi, it did work fine. But when I tried wmv to flv conversion. ffmpeg.exe has crashed and MediaCoder did not respond properly so I had to close it.

Interface: 7 of 10
Easy to use: 5 of 10
Available functions/options: 10 of 10
Stability: 6 of 10
To Flv conversion: Didn’t work
Final Verdict: It’s OK if you want to control all the details of the output video.

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Virtual Dimension – Virtual Desktop Manager with Transparency Support

The best video format converter freewares

MediaCoder