Video Transcoding
Media Coder is an open source video transcoding utility. It supports a large number of formats, and plenty of advanced options for tweaking all of the encoder settings. Fortunately, an extension that is included in the typical install makes it all very easy to use with various presets for small and large video outputs for various formats. It also has presets for various media players such as an Ipod.
I’ve have yet to find a format that it can’t work with, and have had great success creating videos for use on my 5th generation Ipod and my Motorola E815m.
Image Management
Google’s Picasa is a simple yet powerful way to store your photos. Once installed, it will scan your drive for images and present the chronologically by folders. You can then add your own tags to any image, and create albums of images, photos can even exist in more than one album.
Once you’ve got things tagged and organized, the search function lets you quickly find any images within Picasa. There’s some simple editing and tuning tools, one of which is “I’m feeling lucky.” From a technical standpoint it’s a level adjustment algorithm, but like a Google search by the same name, it almost always makes the photo look better.
It’s integrated with Picasa Web Albums, so you can publish your photos online. Picasa is also integrated with various on-line photo finishers, so you can upload to them directly from the program. Finally, it has tools for creating web pages from a selection of photos, based on a customizable template.
On-Line Backup
Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) service coupled with Jungle Disk is an excellent, inexpensive solution for on-line backup.
The Amazon service is $0.15 per gigabyte per month, and $0.10 per gigabyte transfered. It’s pay as you go, so you’re never paying for more storage or bandwidth than you need.
Jungle Disk is a very user friendly front end for the Amazon service. It creates a new network drive on your system that is your access to your storage. Use it just like it’s a local drive in any application. It also includes a customizable backup utility that will backup at a scheduled time and keep archived versions of changed files. Finally, it’s free to try and only $20 to buy it. The license is for every one of your computers, including a USB drive friendly version that you can run on any system without needing to install it.
The 1MB PDF Reader
Adobe Acrobat Reader taking too long to load. Foxit is only 1MB and loads lightning quick.
New Photos
I’ve been working hard to update my web site with a new photo gallery. The gallery is ready to go, you can see it at photos.netbymatt.com, but I still need to upload a years worth of photos to it.
