Free Videos To DVD, Video DVD Authoring Software

Free Videos To DVD, Video DVD Authoring Software: "

Regular Ghacks readers know that I’m using ConvertXToDVD for all my video DVD authoring needs. The commercial software is easy to use but offers all the advanced options I expect from a program like it.

A solid free alternative is Free Videos To DVD from Koyote Soft. The application is as easy to use as ConvertXToDVD which is its greatest strength. Users do not need to worry about different source video formats, conversions or bitrates as is it all handled by the program in the background.

A video DVD is created in six steps that are displayed in a wizard like interface. It begins with the selection of a video DVD project name, DVD format and working directory. The dvd authoring software supports PAL and NTSC DVD formats and can create DVDs that play in 4:3 or 16:9.

The DVD chapters are added in the second step. A file browser assists the user in adding videos from the local hard drive to the DVD. Free Videos To DVD displays the file name and duration of each file as well as the estimated size, duration and quality of the video DVD on the screen.

Here it is also possible to load an existing VIDEO_TS file instead, and modify the quality of the video DVD with the quality slider. A better quality results in a larger size and vice verse. It is important that the size is not passing the red limiter for single layer DVDs. If it does a dual layer DVD is required to burn the video DVD.

The video DVD menu is created in the third step of the process. It is possible to create a DVD without menu which would mean that the DVD plays as soon as it is placed in the DVD player, or a classical menu with options to customize titles, chapters and appearance.

Among the options are titles, fonts and colors for the DVD title and its chapters, the position of those elements on the screen and a background image with options to use the default image or an image on the local system.

The output parameters are defined in step 4 of the process. Video DVDs can be burned directly to a writable DVD, saved as an ISO image for mounting it or burning it later or created as IFO and VOB files only. The DVD writer and speed are selected in this step as well.

The selected videos are then converted by Free Videos To DVD. The speed of the conversion depends largely on the speed of the computer system. It is possible to enable a preview of the video in this step, but it is generally not recommended as it may slow down the conversion.

The videos are processed in the last step of the authoring process. DVDs are either burned directly to a writable DVD, saved as an ISO image or as IFO and VOB files.

Free Videos To DVD is an excellent free application for the Windows operating system. It has been designed to give users of all experience levels a video DVD authoring tool at hand. Advanced users will find out that it lacks a few features that other tools, like ConvertXToDVD, are offering. Still, if you need to quickly turn some videos on your PC into a video DVD then this tool can do that for you, quickly and without problems.

Free Videos To DVD can be downloaded at the official Koyote Soft website. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

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© Martin for gHacks Technology News, 2010. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us, digg, facebook, reddit, twitter
Post tags: dvd authoring, free videos to dvd, koyote soft, video dvd, windows software

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Download Websites With Fresh WebSuction

Download Websites With Fresh WebSuction: "

You sometimes may want to download websites to your local computer system to preserve the information and access them offline. Fresh WebSuction, a software for Windows, can be used to download single pages or entire websites. Users of all experience levels can use the program to download the websites.

Projects are assigned to each website download. The minimum information that is required is the website address. Most users may want to change the project configuration to to better control what gets downloaded from the website. The default download depth is set to download the selected page and all pages that are linked from that page. This alone can go well into the hundreds of pages. Users who want to download more of the website can change the download level in the project settings.

File filters can be configured to only download specific files or types of files from the website. This ranges from only downloading HTML files to audio, video, document and user defined files.

It is for instance possible to download only zip archives from the selected website.

Preferences determine how links and download locations are handled. Downloads range from strictly including downloads that are in the same directory structure to downloads from all over the Internet.

The program distinguishes between followed and unfollowed links with options to make them relative, absolute or leave them as they are.

A click on the download button pulls the information from the selected web address, parses the information and begins the download of all files that fall into selected parameters.

Users need to make sure that they define the right web address for the download, www.ghacks.net and ghacks.net are handled as two different web addresses (which is correct by the way).

All downloaded files and the file structure is displayed in the project contents sidebar during and after the downloads have finished.

It is possible to click on a link to load the downloaded page right in the Fresh WebSuction interface. The files can also be opened in another web browser by loading them directly in that browser. Fresh WebSuction offers to display the online version of the web page as well.

Projects can be updated by selecting that option from the file menu or Download button.

Options are available that are used by all projects. Here it is possible to configure Internet connection details like the number of simultaneous download threads, timeouts and delays, the number of retries, if cookies should be used and how the program should identify itself to the website.

Fresh WebSuction is an easy to use website downloader. It is not nearly as complex as HTtrack which supports additional features like authentication but that does not have to be a disadvantage depending on the project at hand.

The software program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Downloads are provided at the developer website (with email registration) and third party download portals like Softpedia.

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© Martin for gHacks Technology News, 2010. | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us, digg, facebook, reddit, twitter
Post tags: download website, download websites, fresh websuction, portable software, windows software

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What Programs are Accessing the Internet?

What Programs are Accessing the Internet?: "

You only have a couple of websites open on your screen and yet the data activity light of the modem / router is constantly flashing indicating that one or more programs are actively uploading or downloading data from the Internet.

How can you easily find out which programs on your computer are accessing the Internet and what websites are they connecting to?

You have quite a few options. If you are on Windows 7 or Vista, you can use the built-in Performance monitor utility to see a list of all running processes that are currently accessing the Internet.

Alternatively, if you are on a different version of Windows or want something less complex, try TCPEye 1.0. This is a free network monitoring utility that creates a self-updating list of all processes that are currently using your network connection.

What makes TCPEye a bit different is that it also lists the websites / servers that the programs are communicating with and the location (country) where those servers are located. Most other network monitoring tools only mention IP addresses and thus it is up to the user to determine the underlying server name.

If you notice an unwanted connection or a suspicious entry in the TCPEye log, just right click to end the process. Tech-savvy users may also use the netstat command to get similar information.

This article, titled What Programs are Accessing the Internet?, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Windows, Software.

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The Easiest Way to Setup Email Reminders

The Easiest Way to Setup Email Reminders: "

Do you ever want to email something to yourself so that you can remember it later?

It happens to me all the time especially when I am on a mobile phone. For instance, if I come across a cool site that I would want to check out later from the desktop, I just send the URL to my own email account. If I have an idea for a blog or need to remember something, I jot it down in a message and email it to myself.

Now there are quite a few apps that can help you schedule email based reminders, including Google Calendar, but if you prefer to have something really simple that you can use from your email program itself and one that requires no setup, check out FollowUpThen.

With FollowUpThen, you can quickly setup custom email reminders using email itself. Just send a message to time-interval@followupthen.com and the service will send you a copy of the same email message after the specified time interval.

Here are some sample date formats that you may use while setting up email reminders:

• 6pm@followupthen.com (get a reminder at 6 PM exact)


• 6pmTomorrow@followupthen.com (get a reminder at 6 PM tomorrow)


• 10minutes@followupthen.com (get a reminder after 10 minutes)


• 3days@followupthen.com (remind me after 3 days)


• tuesday@followupthen.com (remind me the next Tuesday)


• nov29@followupthen.com (setup email reminders for a specific date)

The service recognizes time zones from the email headers so if you setup a reminder for 11 AM, you’ll be reminded as per your time zone. You may also setup recurring email reminders with FollowUpThen though an online calendar would be a more suitable option for such tasks.

Related: Send Emails in the Future

This article, titled The Easiest Way to Setup Email Reminders, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Email, Gmail, Internet.

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IIT Video Lectures Available for all on YouTube

IIT Video Lectures Available for all on YouTube: "

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and IITs, the premier engineering colleges of India, have earlier joined hands to produce the world’s largest repository of technical video lectures and web-based courses geared towards science and engineering students.

The IIT and IISc faculty have recorded around 4,750 videos for this project till date and anyone, anywhere can watch the lectures online through YouTube at youtube.com/iit.

The project – NPTEL - is funded by the Indian Government and content of the courses is based on the curriculum that’s suggested by AICTE. It should therefore benefit all science and engineering students of India especially those studying in institutes where the local teaching faculty is not at par.

Unlike similar initiatives like MIT OpenCourseWare or Stanford Engineering Everywhere, the course material offered by NPTEL on YouTube is currently not available under a Creative Commons license but that may change in the near future. Also, if you are on a slow Internet connection, you can order DVDs of these videos courses for offline viewing.

Thanks @Krishnan for the tip.

This article, titled IIT Video Lectures Available for all on YouTube, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Education, India.

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Soothing Sounds of Nature for a more Relaxing Workplace

Soothing Sounds of Nature for a more Relaxing Workplace: "

MoodTurn offers an excellent collection of calm and soothing nature sounds that can help you both relax as well as concentrate at work.

At Mood Turn, you can listen to highly-realistic recordings of birds chirping, falling rain drops, ocean waves hitting the beach and quite a few other extremely relaxing natural sounds. Just open this site in a background browser tab and run your favorite sound theme in a loop for as long as you like.

I feel I am more productive on days when it’s raining outside and this site just helps me recreate that atmosphere anytime with a click. Thanks @Orli.

This article, titled Soothing Sounds of Nature for a more Relaxing Workplace, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Music, Offbeat.

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The Best OCR Tools for Converting Images to Text

The Best OCR Tools for Converting Images to Text: "

OCR software let you easily convert images, such as digital photographs, scanned documents, printed books, etc. into text. Once you perform OCR on an image, you’ll be able to copy-paste or edit the text content of that image without any retyping and it also becomes more searchable.

The Best Web-based OCR Services

Most scanners ship with some sort of OCR software but if you don’t have a scanner, you can simply capture a photograph of the printed text with your digital camera or even your mobile phone and then use an online OCR utility to extract text out of that image.

Meet the best online OCR services that can help you convert images into text.

1. Google Docs – When you upload an image file or a scanned PDF to Google Docs, check the option that says “Convert text to Google Docs format” and Google Docs will automatically perform OCR on the file before saving it to your account.

If the OCR operation is successful, all the extracted text is stored as a new document else Google Docs will store your original image without any modification.

With Google Docs, you can perform OCR on images and PDFs as large as 2 MB, the text recognition accuracy is quite impressive and there are no limits on the number of files that you can process in a day. However, Google Docs won’t retain the original formatting of the document and the OCR engine almost fails with low-resolution images.

2. Abbyy FineReader – FineReader Online is a web-based OCR service that can instantly convert your PDF files and images into corresponding office file formats. This is an Abbyy service and therefore the character recognition accuracy is quite good.

Unlike the OCR engine in Google Docs that can only recognize printed text written Latin characters, FineReader can understand a much wider variety of languages. It even works with multilingual documents that have text written multiple languages.

A free account at FineReader Online will only let you convert a handful of images to text and you’ll have to shell out around $3 per 10 pages for additional conversions.

3. OnlineOCR.net – Online OCR, as the name suggests, is a cloud based OCR service that can handle all common images formats including scanned PDFs. If you have multiple images that you would like to convert to text in one go, you can put them all in a single zip file and upload it to Online OCR.

Of all the OCR services that I have tried so far, Online OCR has impressed me the most. The character recognition accuracy is quite good and the converted documents look like a replica of the original images. In my limited test with three different types of images, Online OCR was able to preserve the structure and formatting after the conversion in all the three case.

Like FineReader, Online OCR offers credits for converting around 5-6 images to text for free and after the limit is over, you’ll have to pay around $4 per 50 pages.

4. FreeOCR.com – If you ever need to extract plain text from an image or a scanned PDF file, Free OCR may be worth a try. The service requires no registration and you can handle up to 10 image uploads per hour.

Free OCR is like a graphical front-end for Google’s Tesseract OCR engine that is often considered as one of the most accurate text recognition engines around. However, Tesseract supports only a limited number of languages and it ignores most of the formatting of the scanned image.

5. OCR Terminal – OCR Terminal is one of the most mature online OCR services out there that not only supports images and scanned PDFs but even software screenshots.

For instance, if you ever get an error message on your computer, capture a screenshot, upload the image to OCR terminal and it will return you the entire error in plain text that you can copy-paste in emails or online forums.

OCR Terminal is internally powered by Abbyy’s OCR engine. A free account with OCR Terminal gets you 20 free conversions every month and you can pay around 7-9 ¢ per additional conversion.

6. OCR Online – Like FreeOCR, OCR Online doesn’t require any registration and you can translate up to 100 images to text in a single day. It also supports a large number of languages.

OCR Online offers good recognition accuracy and preserves most of the original formatting but what you’ll like most about this service is batch processing. You can upload a large number of files in one batch and it will output the results as one document.

Online OCR Software – A Comparison

[*] One obvious downside will all the above mentioned OCR software is that they work only with printed text, they cannot recognize characters from hand-written text.

The Best OCR Tools for Converting Images to Text

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

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