WIndows/Mac/Linux: VLC, our favourite plays-it-all download, has rolled out its official 1.1 release, cementing the hardware video acceleration for smoother HD playing, bundling support for the open WebM video standard, and implementing lots of fixes and speed-ups in the code.
Mac/Windows: If you’re not too keen on buying movies from the iTunes Store but would like to organise your movies in a program like iTunes, MetaX will save you the time of manually tagging everything by fetching metadata from the net.
Windows/Linux: Burning any old video file to a playable DVD is a bit of a hassle. We’ve always liked using DVD Flick for tackling the task, but DVDStyler is another great option with a bit more focus on nice menus.
Mobile computing blog Mobiputing highlights how to automatically sync your Android device using previously mentioned DoubleTwist, your Android phone and a free Android app called Auto Mount.
The web is littered with music — given away for free, embeded in videos, and so on. Puniz indexes publicly accessible music and lets you grab the source tune.
TheFilter has long been a popular iTunes plugin for helping sort through your iTunes music and automatically build playlists. You can still get TheFilter as an iTunes plugin but it’s also a web-based suggestion engine for media of all sorts.
From the obvious-but-nice-to-have-it-backed-with-data department: we’re watching less TVand using the Internet more, but one doesn’t necessarily preclude the other.
When you want to to share music, movies, photos or other files online, you’ve got countless options. We’ve examined most, and for our money, one tool emerges on top of the heap for its ease of use, wide support, and all-around excellence.
