One of the possibilities internet offer us with the improvement in the connectivity is the possibility of accessing all kinds of multimedia content almost simultaneously with its official launch. This way, we can watch the latest Hollywood premiere online, even before it´s released in the cinema. However, online streaming services, either for being free or has a basic infrastructure or because sometimes are overloaded with users, they do not usually provide the necessary fluidity to watch free movies from our PC.

Watch online movies for free thanks to the internet

The solution is to download the movies to our pc, once these are saved on the hard disk, we will be able to watch them without cuts. To do so, we need to find on the web, sites where films are available and use a program such as uTorrent, if this is under P2P protocol, or a download manager like Internet Download Manager or jDownloader, if this is in a “direct download “.

Once we´ve downloaded with the help of some of these applications, we have to play them on our PC. There are many media players, all them quite effective, among the most popular we can mention Windows Media Player, VLC or RealPlayer. However, it is possible that even if we have a good player we cannot watch free movies uncut as we wanted since we do not have the necessary codec’s to do so. Some of the most complete codec packs that will avoid any difficulties are Elisoft Codec Pack or CCCP

This way, by having these tools, we can finally seat comfortably in our couch and watch our favorite movie without cuts.

Video editing made easy with Windows movie maker

Windows Movie Maker makes home movies amazingly fun. With Movie Maker, you can create, edit, and share your home movies right on your computer. Build your movie with a few simple drag-and-drops. Delete bad shots and include only the best scenes. Then share your movie via the Web, e-mail, or CD. Using third-party software you can even take movies you’ve made and turn them into DVDs. You can also save your movie back to the video tape in your camera to play back on a TV or on the camera itself.

Upon running Windows Movie Maker, a windows-like interface will be displayed. WMM interface is divided into three panes. On the right, there is a preview window and on the left we have a Movie Task panel including several shortcuts for editing tasks.

Movie Task is divided into four parts and each of them contains several tasks. Now, let´s get started. Click “Capture Video” and then “Capture from Video Device” if you don´t have any videos. If you do have videos or images, click “Import Videos” or “Import Pictures” or “import Audio or Music”.

With this guide, we´ll start by importing an existing video file. After the import process has finished, we can see the imported videos/images/audio in the Collection pane (the one located in the center of the screen). We can start editing them by dragging them to the Timeline on the bottom of the screen.

Once we arranged the video, images and audio in the desired order, we can start combining all the elements on the timeline.

If you do not wish to use any effects or transitions, we can also join them manually one after another by dragging them to the timeline in the desired order by trimming the timeline elements with the arrows next to each video, image or audio file. We can also choose the option “Make an Automovie” (found on “Edit Movie”) for the program to do it automatically.

However, if you want to give your projects a personal touch, we can use several types of effects and transitions by clicking “View Video effects” and “View Video transitions” in the “Edit Movie” task. To use effects and transitions, simply drag them into the elements of the timeline.

Once we wrapped up the project, go to “3. Finish Movie” and “Save to my computer/CD/DV Camera/the web” or “Send in e-mail”. Finally, choose a name for the file and the program will start encoding (creating) the project.

Windows Movie Maker is a user-friendly application for video editing that applies for novice and experienced users alike. Starting creating movies and slide shows from your photos and videos, and share them with your friends and family.

Which player is worthy of your multimedia files

A multimedia player enables you to play movies, music, video clips, TV shows and any audio and video file. Multimedia players have become essential applications for any PC delivering the highest audio and video quality. Next, you´ll get to know the most popular players covering all multimedia aspects. We introduce you to Windows Media Player, Winamp, iTunes, Songbird and VLC Media Player. These players present features of their own, some of them allow users to manage their files, and others feature hundreds of plug-ins.

Windows Media Player

As with almost every type of program in the world of the PC, the influence of Microsoft Windows is strong when it comes to choosing a multimedia player. So what better place to begin talking about these programs than with the one that is installed by default on this operating system?

Windows Media Player strength lies in the use and management of multimedia files, mainly thanks to its Media Library, with which users can arrange and catalogue their files, thereby making it easier to find exactly what they want to play. What’s more, it features tools for ripping and burning CDs, together with another for synchronizing with portable devices.

This player also comes with a collection of accessories and enhancements with which you can, among other things, change various aspects of the audio output, link the program to Windows Live Messenger, and more.

Without a doubt, the weakest aspects of Microsoft’s media player are the options for playing podcasts and the lack of features it offers users for playing videos.

Winamp

Historically, Winamp has always been the most popular multimedia player, thanks to its winning combination of interesting tools, low resource consumption, and ease of use.

Nowadays, Winamp comes with various different tools for playing audio and video, podcast subscription options, playlists, m3u support, support for streaming radio, a multimedia library, and synchronization with all sorts of mobile devices.

As if all that wasn’t enough, this player also stands out for the large amount of plug-ins that can be added to it, thus achieving unique sounds, professional-standard automatic track mixing, and much more.

iTunes

iTunes is the multimedia player of Mac OS, which Apple has now ported to the Windows platform, resulting in a rather strange hybrid.
In themselves, the player’s features are good. It has multiple features for playing audio and video, supports podcasts, plays internet radio stations from all over the world, and can burn and rip audio to and from audio CDs. Plus, it features a wide variety of options for the Apple iPod and iPhone, even if the same can’t be said for other portable devices.

However, after using it for a while you can see that, despite being a great player, there’s no justification for the amount of system resources that it uses up, mainly due to the fact that it is not a program that has been designed for use under Microsoft Windows. Add to this certain other limitations and it becomes very clear that Apple launched iTunes thinking almost exclusively about iPod and iStore users, rather than the possible needs of those users open to other options.

Songbird

If by now you were thinking that there’s no player out there capable of beating the ones already mentioned, you’d be very wrong. Just as Web 2.0 continues to make headlines, Songbird could be described as a sort of Player 2.0. The central portion of its user interface features a Mozilla-based web browser, complete with tabs, that is sure to make this program a hit.

Songbird is able to play some of your favourite tracks even if you don’t have them stored on your PC since it provides you with access to sites where you can search for and play free-to-download songs and other audio files. What’s more, you’ll have a large number of online plug-ins at hand which will notably enhance and build upon the performance of the player.

It goes without saying that this program also comes with support for many different audio and video formats, along with different models and types of portable media devices.

VLC Media Player

Last but not least we have VLC Media Player, a program that may not look like much of a threat to the other players talked about here but that, once you start to use it, you’ll see just how handy it can be to have around.

VLC doesn’t have any library for organizing and administrating your multimedia files. Instead, you simply make a playlist to listen to right now or load a previously saved one. The user interface is pretty basic – and not in the least attractive to be honest – but, despite this, this program is one of the most popular media players around.

The secret lies in the large bundle of codecs that it comes with and which let it play practically any multimedia file that you can get your hands on. No matter what challenge it’s faced with, VLC responds without hesitation, consuming very few system resources whilst achieving an enviable play-back quality.

Choosing just one single player would mean missing out on the features and possible benefits of all the others, for which reason combining more than one and then making use of the features that you need or want the most is surely the best answer when it comes down to kitting out your PC.

In this way, it´s important to know which player is the most convenient according to the multimedia content we wish to play. We consider that Windows Media Player, Winamp, Songbird and iTunes are all great players with similar features and the same audio and video quality level. Only VLC makes a difference thank to the user friendly codec installation. But as we all know, the appearance in a player is also important, that´s why Winamp and iTunes are both great looking players with a wide variety of wonderful skins and great functionality.

The video´s software your PC need

The change from analog to digital had a significant influence on the video, by having a PC you can see movies before its opening, complete series seasons, home videos made by digital or mobile phones, music videos and many more. The only requirement needed to take full advantage of this possibility is having the proper software that supports the multiple options the video files has (format, compression, codec used, etc).

We will show you here different applications so you can play any video you have (VLC Media Player) solve any format compatibility problem (Combined Community Codec) avoid DVD protection (DvdFab HD Decrypter) and burn discs with your favorite videos (CdBurnerXp).

VLC Media Player

VLC Media Player is a multimedia player very easy to use that also features a user-friendly interface. This software has many options to play files in multiple formats, including DVD and streaming video.

VLC Media Player includes its own codec pack being able this way of playing a wide range of video formats without depending on the Windows codec. One important feature to mention is that it is able to play the incomplete videos we are downloading from Emule, allowing us to see if we are downloading the video we want.

This software is useful to play videos and audio but has being developed to the video side adding new options like the subtitle reproduction and the capacity of playing several audio tracks on a movie.

Combined Community Codec Pack

Combined Community Codec Pack is a complete codec pack which was initially designed for the reproduction of anime videos, and now it has become one of the most popular codec packs in the world. Unlike other packs, Combined Community Codec only installs on our system the necessary codecs, taking a minimal disk space while avoiding compatibility issues with other codecs on our system.

Before installing Combined Community Codec, the installer detects possible codec issues with your system -previously installed codecs that is – avoiding further codec troubleshooting. Combined Community Codec includes among its features two complete multimedia players: Media Player Classic and Zoom Player Standard. With these players you can take full advantage of the codecs included in the package, such as: Haali Media Splitter (DirectShow filter for MKV, MP4, OGM and AVI), VSFilter (for SSA/ASS, SRT y VOBSUB subtitles), Ffdshow CCCP (for H.264/AVC, DivX and vid) and WMV9VCM (for Windows Media). Apart from having standard codecs such as Divx, Xvid and AVI, CCCP offers free audio and video players and an application for making movie subtitles.

DvdFab HD Decrypter

This useful tool allows ripping all kind of DVD movies and videos to the PC to play it, share and burn it later in other disc. Besides offering the possibility of having on our computer any DVD we want, it rips incredible fast and easy.

DvdFab HD Decrypter offers many options to rip, between them we can choose to do it to the entire disc, only on the main part of the movie, on some episodes, with a particular language and subtitle and more. It stands out by doing the rip beyond any protection the disc might have being these CSS, RC, RCE, APS, UOPs or Sony ARccOS.

CdBurnerXp

CdBurnerXp is another amazing burning tool. CdBurnerXp supports CDs and DVDs both DVD and DVDRW, as well as the possibility of creating ISO files. It also allows users to rip audio CDs.

The interface is very easy-to-use, It´s divided into several modules allowing you to drag and drop files. Another important aspect of this burner is that it consume very little system resources. You can also create boot disks and includes a bin/nrg to ISO converter.

Without a doubt, the popularity of Nero suite makes of CdBurnerXp unknown software, nevertheless, its low resource consume and stability makes it highly recommended.

Any Video Converter

Any Video Converter is really useful to convert our movies or videos to the different formats present nowadays, since it can convert video files between many formats.

This tool has many features worth mention: it allows converting a great amount of formats, between them, the popular “mpg”, “avi” and another formats for complex devices. In addition to this, it offers the preview option for the videos we are going to convert and select the segment or part of the video we want to convert in case we do not want to convert the whole video.

It´s use is very simple as it features a user-friendly interface, but despite this, we must say that this software presents some disadvantages. Compared with other software, Any Video Converter does not offer any option to modify the output video qualities, though this does not interfere with its performance.

As we could see, with these software you can make any action regarding videos. They are a good choice when dealing with videos and taking full advantage of our computer.

YouTube to rent movies for u$s4

It seems YouTube is readying up a new service to provide users with the possibility to rent movies online. Unofficial news came up indicating that Google is already in the works to negotiate with Sony Pictures, Lions gate Entertainment Corporation, Metro Goldwyn Mayer and Warner Bros, so that people all over the world can watch/download any released movie for an estimate of four dollars.

This news sets a before and after regarding YouTube as a free video file hoster. Due to the nature of the change, fewer advertisements would be seen on the site. Maintaining a popular video file sharing site such as YouTube it´s not exactly cheap, millions of users watch videos everyday and streaming technology is not free. For this reason, Google Inc –YouTube´s owner- is also trying to include major commercial content in its site since sponsors and advertisers prefer the latter over home-made videos –despite their popularity.

“While we don’t comment on rumor and speculation,” said YouTube spokesman Chris Dale by phone, “we hope to expand on both our great relationships with movie studios and on the selection and types of videos we offer.”

As for retail DVD sales, this wouldn’t be a bad business at all since sales are falling by the day and the costs would be obviously existing, and accepting an agreement with YouTube would be a smarter choice. Though the movies rental service is already available in Amazon, iTunes o Netflix, YouTube and Google ´s popularity could promote a major change in online rental services.

If some of you are asking yourself “Will YouTube no longer be a free video file sharing website?” There´s not rumors indicating that it won´t, so there´s nothing to panic about for YouTube users. Google Inc and YT just want to add new feature and new services for users all over the world.

Torrents have been the most popular type of download since its appearance on the internet, enabling users to download huge files faster than any other P2P application. uTorrent is the best torrent client to download movies, music games and more.

uTorrent

There are numerous different types of downloads that you can make over the Internet but here we take a closer look at those that work using .torrent files.

Basically, in order to share a file, a .torrent file containing information about it is stored on a centralized server. When the file is downloaded by different users, this .torrent file collects data about the number of transfers and the number of peers who possess all or part of the file.

So, this is where the need for an application that can work with this particular system comes in. Such an application is uTorrent.
The program reads the .torrent file chosen by the user, which contains information about where to download each part of the file from according to the best available connection, thereby guaranteeing a good overall download speed.

uTorrent has all the tools needed for beginners and a large number of additional configuration options for more expert users. It features a clear push-button panel from which to control the client and a list of all the downloads, indicating whether they are in progress, completed, active or inactive.

On the right-hand side it has a .torrent search engine, a useful feature considering that, unlike other P2P networks such as eDonkey2000, this system does not include its own index of files within the client and users must find their downloads via external web sites.

To get the most out of the .torrent files you must always keep in mind the number of Seeds and Peers a file has. The more of them a file has, the faster it will download. Once you’ve found the torrent file you want, click on it, choose to open it with uTorrent and the client will take over.

It’s worth emphasizing that the client’s window always allows you to see exactly what files you’re downloading. This is especially helpful with compressed files and means you needn’t waste time downloading something that was labelled incorrectly on the web site.

The lower part of the screen displays a variety of data and statistics about the currently selected download. Here you can see all sorts of General information, such as the time elapsed, the amount downloaded, the speed at which it is currently downloading, and more. You can also get data about the Peers with whom you are sharing files, the Pieces that make up the download, and the different Files that are contained in the complete download as well as view information about the Speed of the download and consult the Logger.
Without a doubt, uTorrent is one of the best programs out there for downloading .torrent files. All that’s left then is for you to install it and see for yourself why it´s the best and most reliable torrent client.

Download uTorrent