Brad Trupp

The VLC media player at http://www.videolan.org/ is a cross-platform media player for Windows, Mac, and many flavours of Linux.

I use the Windows version on my XP machines and am very pleased with it.

The VideoLAN - VLC media player is released under the GNU General Public License.

The tag line for Miro at http://www.getmiro.com/ is "The only video player you need. Free and open-source, because open media matters.".

Miro is a free application that turns your computer into an internet TV video player with versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

You subscribe to video feeds (aka channels) and Miro downloads them and lets you play them.

Miro is open source.

HandBrake, found at http://handbrake.m0k.org/, is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

You can use Handbrake to load your DVD's onto a hard drive for ease of access.

In my testing, it took between 30 to 60 minutes to convert a DVD using HandBrake into MPEG-4 format. I prefer to play the DVDs directly rather than storing them in my media library, but it is still a excellent and useful utility.

DVD-Assist can be found at http://mysite.verizon.net/resohjb1/Projects.html.

From the author -- "One shortcoming of Apple’s Front Row is the lack of support for VIDEO_TS folders. DVD Assist makes it possible to have a library of DVDs on your Mac and use the elegant Front Row interface to select and play them.".

Basically DVD-Assist is an Applescript "Stay Open" applet. You will need to put a tiny "Play Me" movie in each sub-directory where you have VIDEO_TS files. When you click on the "Play Me" movie in Front Row, DVD-Assist takes over and plays the movie in DVD Player instead.

Simple but extremely useful.

DisplayConfigX at http://www.3dexpress.de/ is a program you can use to adjust your Mac to optimally match your monitor by adjusting resolutions and refresh rates outside of limited choices that your Mac has built-in.

DisplayConfigX works for free for low to mid size resolutions but purchase and registration is required for higher resolutions.

One important note -- make sure you have VNC installed and working before you use DisplayConfigX -- since if you mess up your display settings bad enough you will not be able to see your desktop on your monitor. However, VNC will allow you to work remotely and fix things back up.

7-zip at http://www.7-zip.org/ is an open source file archiver with a high compression ratio that supports packing and unpackinh in many formats like 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR, as well as unpacking support for formats like RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS.

One useful feature is that it will splice together multipart files.

7-zip is for Windows. There some "unofficial" ports for Linux and other systems like Mac but I belive most are command line versions only.