There are dozens of great programs for converting media files from one format to another. Some of our favorites are Super, MediaCoder, and WinLAME, and VirtualDub.But if you're looking for a fast and simple solution, you probably won't find many programs that are as simple to use as Oxelon Media Converter.

Oxelon adds two shortcuts to your Windows context menu: one for transcoding audio files, the other for transcoding video. All you have to do is right-click on any media file in Windows Explorer and select the file format you want to convert it to. Oxelon will open a new window and ask you where you'd like to save the file. You can also change audio and video codecs, framerate, bitrate, and video dimensions as well as other settings. But all you really have to do at that point is hit the "Conversion" button to start converting your file.

The free program does have a few quirks. The most annoying one is that every time you close the program, Oxelon Media Converter will open its homepage in your default web browser. The other is that I had trouble converting some of the video files I had shot with my digital camera. The only way I could get them to encode was by selecting the "no audio" option, although it's possible that if I had spent more time fiddling I could have found another option that would have worked. Admittedly, my digital camera records audio at an odd sampling rate.

Oxelon recommends downloading and installing a plugin file to add support for a wide variety of audio and video formats. You can find a picture of the settings screen after the break.

[via Instant Fundas]

Xoopit is a service that turns Gmail into a powerful media browser, letting you quickly view your attachments. Since Yahoo! acquired it, though, it's been available to Yahoo! Mail users, and now Yahoo! is looking to make it exclusive. Xoopit will become the My Photos feature of Yahoo! Mail, and it's being pulled out of Gmail completely. Even the Firefox add-on and Facebook app for Gmail are being discontinued.

How does Yahoo! explain removing Xoopit from its biggest group of users? "We will not be able to keep investing in our Xoopit for Gmail product, and don't want you to end up with a lousy experience." That's going to leave a lot of Xoopit Gmail users disgruntled. Here's how this move affects you if you're one of them: your Xoopit data disappears on November 13th, but your attachments remain untouch (albeit unindexed) in your account. I don't know about other Xoopit users, but losing the service certainly doesn't make me want to sign up for an email address with the company that took it away. Bad form, Yahoo!

Dazzboard, an app that enables easy media transfers between your computer and your mobile device, now has a Facebook version. This new Facebook app lets you skip a step in the process of uploading photos and videos from your portable phone, camera, or even PSP to Facebook. Instead of going from device to computer to Facebook, you can use Dazzboard to drag and drop media from one location to another.

Although you can use Dazzboard to transfer media to and from your PC, there's no desktop software required. You can transfer your media to and from Facebook anywhere, as long as you have a browser and a place to plug in your device. There's also Flickr and Youtube support, and you can drag and drop media amongst various networks the same way you'd do it between your phone and your computer. The app is currently only available for Windows, and seems to work best with IE8. Mac compatibility is in the works.

Spezify is a kind of freeform search tool that incorporates websites, videos, images, microblog posts and more into a grid of results. It's not going to beat Google at finding some specific thing you're looking for, but it's impressive if you're looking to get an overview of a topic, especially if you're a visual person. Instead of showing text results, like Google, Spezify is more like a multimedia wall that you can scroll across vertically or horizontally to take in information at a glance.

Spezify also provides a list of related words at the top of the results screen, which can help you explore a topic further. Videos in the results are all embedded, and can be played without leaving the site, and a lot of the text results feature slightly longer previews than Google results do. All in all, I don't think Spezify is meant to replace any of the major search engines, but you might consider using it when you want a visual summary of a given topic.

This weekend I finished setting up a fresh triple-boot install on my MSI laptop. With my operating systems ready to go, the time had come to start reinstalling applications. While it wasn't a conscious decision, I noticed that the majority of my apps were Open Source - so I decided to keep the ball rolling.

Even if you haven't just gone through a reformat, these are great applications and well worth installing. If you have, then hopefully this list will provide you with a solid base of programs to get you started with your fresh, new Windows install!

Web Browsers: Chromium, Firefox
They excel at different things, so I install both browsers by default. Chromium is great for all-purpose surfing, while I use Firefox and my favorite extensions to tackle my daily web-based work.

Office: OpenOffice.Org, Sumatra, PDFCreator
For lightweight PDF reading and creation from any Windows app, Sumatra and PDFCreator are solid options. OpenOffice.Org, well, it's the name to beat in open source suites.

There's a rumor going around that Microsoft could be preparing to purchase music search engine SeeqPod, or at least acquire some of the company's technology. Now where did this crazy rumor come from? SeeqPod. If you go to the site right now, which is for the most part shut down, and hover your mouse over the word "metamorphosis," you get a link to search.microsoft.com. Odd, no?

Now in an interview with Wired, SeeqPod's CEO has confirmed that the company has been talking to Microosft for the past year. No deal has been signed yet, and no cash has changed hands. But it looks pretty likely that something is going on here.

SeeqPod made a name for itself as a music search engine that would scour the web for MP3 files, letting you play them in a Flash based player. While the site never hosted any copyrighted files itself, it made it possible to find and play thousands, if not millions of illegally uploaded media files. Somehow I doubt Microsoft will purchase SeeqPod and relaunch the site using the same business model. But SeeqPod's search tools could be repurposed to help users discover and play legal audio, video, and other rich media content from around the web if Microsoft or another company with the right know how decides to put SeeqPod's algorithm to a different use.

It's not hard to find an online service that lets you upload a few hundred megabytes of pictures, music, and movie clips. Some even give you 5 or 50GB. But Oosah is a service that's upping the game. By a lot. Oosah claims that users get 1TB of online storage for free.

There are some limitations. You can only upload videos that are 200MB or smaller, images that are 50MB or less, and MP3 files that are 9MB or less. And you can't upload executable files, office documents, or other files. Just movies, music, and pictures. But Oosah does accept most common media file types. There's also an option to upload media directly from your camera or capture device without copying it to your computer first.

Besides offering an incredible amount of storage space, there are a few other things that set Oosah apart. One of the coolest features is integration with YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Picasa. You can associate Oosah with your other social network/media accounts and manage your media libraries from a central location. Oosah has an incredibly simple file manager that lets you easily drag and drop files from Flickr to Oosah, from Oosah to Facebook, and so on.

Does the service really provide a whole 1TB of storage to every user? Honestly, I can't say. It would take me forever to upload that much data. But if the promise of a huge amount of free storage is a publicity stunt to get people to try to use the service, it worked. And I have to say, I'm impressed.

Right now all Oosah accounts are free. The company says it may eventually create a premium service that offers paying customers even more storage.

One word of warning. When I signed up I had to check a box that said I agreed to Oosah's privacy policy. But there was no clear link to said policy. A quick Google search turned up a list of terms and conditions which also makes mention of a separate privacy policy. But it's nowhere to be found.

[via shankri-la]

MediaJoin is a free Windows utility that joins media files. You probably could have figured that out from its name. But let's get a bit more specific, shall we? The program lets you select a group of audio or video files, put them in order, and then spit them out as one long media file.

For example, say you've got a bunch of MP3s representing a live concert and you'd rather have just one long file that will play the whole concert from start to end. Just select the MP3s, select your output format, and MediaJoin will do the rest.

The utility even lets you mix and match file types. So you can combine WAV, MP3, and WMA files and output the results as a single file. One thing to keep in mind is that MediaJoin appears to perform some recompression. So if you're starting with a compressed media format like MP3 you might notice some quality loss in the finished product unless you choose uncompressed WAV as your output format.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

The plain truth is I don't like working with media files. Watching them, or listening to them, sure, I'm just as into that as the next girl. When it comes to actually converting them from something captured off an external device or my screen, though, my stomach turns. It's not an aversion that's peculiar to Linux. I hate using the Windows for those same tasks. Since I don't have access to a Mac, I can't vouch for the ease of media conversion on them, but I can safely say that as ubiquitous as Quicktime is, I have very little luck working with (or viewing) Quicktime files on any machine with any operating system in my possession.

Linux presents special challenges with media file conversions. The good news is that though some of the tools might be a little tricky to decipher, they do a great job with conversions and tend to encompass a wide range of file types. Some tools can be used with GUI front-ends, and some I've found are just a lot faster and easier to bang out a command in a terminal window. Many of these tools are either installed by default in a number of Linux distributions, or can be added with a few clicks through the distro's repositories.

So I admit it was with a whole lot of fear and loathing that I decided to include screencasts in a recent post on KDE. My video grab software was working wonderfully, but it saved my files as .ogv. That wouldn't be a problem if I weren't hosting it elsewhere, and if the conversion software on that site didn't require it be in a format other than .ogv. And Ogg files, being funny beasts, aren't always the easiest things to convert.

And certainly, they aren't the only things you'd want to convert in Linux. So let's shake down how it's done.

Adobe just added new video content to its AIR-based Media Player, but it all pretty much sucks in one form or another. The Adobe Media Player is a slick media browser that can play and subscribe to videos from the web, and it also provides somewhat high-resolution content from Adobe's media partners such as MTVN and Comedy Central.

Despite the fact that the player is very visually appealing and easy to navigate, it's just not that useful. It's possible to use any regular, free browser such as Firefox to watch online video content, allowing web-travelers to avoid the installation of an extra app. As a result, the main reason for installing the app (unless you really, really like the subscription feature) is to watch the 25,000+ videos provided by Adobe.

And that's exactly what's wrong here. Adobe's video library is still weak, and most good of the good TV shows aren't full episodes but rather short clips. Furthermore, the full videos Adobe is adding aren't current TV hits like Lost or Battlestar Galactica. Instead, Adobe partnered with CBS and Sony to add tons of clips and a few movies/episodes from old stuff like Men in Black, Jerry Maguire, The Love Boat, Beverly Hilly 90210, Family Ties, and even The Price is Right. They might as well call the app something to the tune of Adobe Senior TV On Demand.

Sure, Adobe has the money to keep it up and running, but why bother if the company isn't bringing its best to the table? Why not partner with Hulu and create an official, fully functional Hulu AIR app instead?

The newest version of the VLC media player isn't ready for the streets yet, but if you're they type who doesn't mind risking your precious computer for the sake of satisfying a primal curiosity for experimental software, the pre-release of VLC 0.9.0 is now available for both Windows and Mac. Unfortunately, anybody with a Windows 98/ME or OS X 10.3.9 machine is out luck since such technology is no longer socially acceptable as those operating systems are no longer supported.

It now supports Last.fm (AKA Audioscrobbler) straight out of the box disk image, so it'll update your Last.fm account as you play music through VLC. To enable Last.fm support in the 0.9.0 release, enter your username in the preferences pane under Audioscrobber, but don't forget to visit Control interfaces to check the box labeled "Submission of played songs to Last.fm."

Other changes also include better tag support, more subtitle support, improved mouse gestures, album art support, Shoutcast TV listings, and a lot more that we don't want to bore you with, but you're more than welcome to check out the whole list on the VLC forums.

[via CyberNet]

Fine, it doesn't really takes names, but you won't care after you download and install this do-all media converter. FormatFactory's simple interface and broad file type support make it an excellent weapon of choice for media file junkies.

What could be better than a program that will convert audio, video, and image files from and to just about any format you can think of? How about one that does it all batch-style with minimal clicking? FormatFactory doesn't care what files you want to swap in what order, just feed it your sources and watch it go to work. Unlike a lot of similar apps, this one doesn't limit you to only video or audio, or even to one file at a time.

So in our last post about the P2P media sharing site CloudFire, y'all jumped in and answered our question about BitTorrent's Bram Cohen.

This time around, there are no questions to answer. It's first come, first serve.

We have 100 invites to the first lucky folks who use "downloadsquad" without quotes naturally to sign up here.

We've had a bit of a play with CloudFire and the things that jump right out to us is that it seriously is easy to share media files with people who might not be as geeky as a lot of us are. And you know what, us geeky people like easy things too, that's why a lot of us use Macs.

There are some random issues as expected, and you have to make sure that the person connecting to your media has the most updated version of Flash, but other than that it works nicely. A good amount of bandwidth on your end doesn't hurt either.

They're completely open to your feedback and have been asking us what we think.

It's still very pre-beta and stealthy so here's your chance to join in!

UPDATE: If the code doesn't work then you might not have gotten in on the 100 invites. If we get more, we'll pass along the word!

So this uber smart dude Zodttd, has done something pretty sweet.

He has successfully ported the popular VLC media player over to the iPhone. Yes, the iPhone.

Big deal you say? Well check out what you'll now be able to do on your little piece of Apple mobile goodness: Drag, drop and play MPEG/MPG, AVI and MP3 media formats.

Woohooo!

Soon it will play FLAC and OGG and he's checking out how to build support for VCD, DivX, WMA, and WMV.

You will have to break free from the jail on your iPhone to see this baby working, and it's currently in beta.

One question though, Why aren't these formats already supported by Apple? Aren't we all tired of the format wars at this point? If you pay $400 or more for a device, shouldn't you get a say in what plays on it and what doesn't?

What do you think? Comment us up.

[via Gizmodo]

We've always been fond of Amarok. It has some good features, nice add-ons, and felt just a little friendlier than some other Linux media players. We recently discovered a contender to the title of most loved Linux media player, the ominously named Banshee. Fortunately, Banshee doesn't involve listening to shrieking demons, unless that's your genre of choice.

It's an application that has been increasingly packaged with distributions that include GNOME as the default desktop. For those distributions that don't include it on a standard install, it's almost always available from a repository. Many of those repositories include, at present, Banshee's 0.13.3 version. This is the stable version of Banshee and shows loads of promise, but it isn't quite Amarok.

We recommend, if possible, hunting down packages for your distro of choice of the latest version of Banshee (0.99.2). If there are no packages available, try installing the newer version via Subversion. It takes a bit more time, but it is well worth the effort.

Why? Because Banshee 0.99.2 (or alternately, Banshee 1.0 Beta 2) is an almost completely different screamin' demon. It may be a beta version, and not without its bugs, but it works much more smoothly than the 0.13.3 install we were using previously on Hardy Heron.