µTorrent

For ages, µTorrent was only available on Windows, which made converts like me very unhappy indeed.

But luckily, it was recently made available for Macs. "So what makes µTorrent better than all those other torrent clients about?" I'll tell you what! To me, µTorrent just seems so much easier to use than all the other torrent clients about. It's lighter, faster, and comes with an inbuilt option to search through a selection of Torrent sites. Maybe it's the fact that I've become accustomed to it, but using µTorrent just seems natural.

µTorrent Website

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Hunter Suite

It can be tough owning things. You forget exactly which things you own, you forget exactly where they're kept and, try as you may, you just can't seem to remember if a possession is yours, or if it belongs to one of your mates. But thankfully, a nice fella who goes by the name of JAres has come up with a simple, yet oh so effective solution for all these problems.

The Hunter Suite is a collection of three programmes. DVD Hunter, Game Hunter and Book Hunter. They help you keep track of your DVD, Game and Book libraries, and can each be downloaded individually.

The programmes themselves are very simple. On opening them, you are presented with a sidebar, and main section. The sidebar contains the titles of your lists. (The default lists given are Library, Borrowed and Wishlist, although these can all be changed, and you can create new ones too.) And in the main section, you are presented with the list of what you own, want or have borrowed.

When entering a new possession, you get given a little form to fill in. This includes all sorts of information. E.g. In Book Hunter, it asks you for the Author, Publisher, Language etc. You can choose to fill all this in yourself, but if like myself, you're of the lazy inclination, you'll be happy to hear that all you need to do is enter the title, click autocomplete, and all of the relevant details are fetched from the Amazon website.

The Hunter Suite Developer's Page

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Songbird

There are many, many music players out there. But besides a few minor differences between them, they're all the same. But not Songbird!

For those of you who've heard of Songbird before, you would've undoubtedly heard of the fact that it was extremely sluggish, had many bugs and was prone to crashing. But all this has changed in the new release. The new Songbird works extremely quick - my iTunes library of almost 6,000 songs was imported in a couple of minutes.

The main feature of Songbird that draws it away from all of the other generic media players out there is its customisations. Whereas iTunes is quite closed, without many third party applications, Songbird has a plethora of these. From within Songbird, you can launch its built in browser, and search through all the recommendations, and download and install them all from within Songbird itself.

The amount of available add-ons for Songbird are unbelievable. You can get all of the standard ones that are found on many different players, like artwork finders, lyric finders and last.fm support, as well as an abundance of new and original ones. There's an add-on that displays upcoming concerts for an artist you're playing, an add-on that recommends a new artist that isn't in your library based on what you're listening to, and many other intuitive ones like these. Songbird is like the Firefox of music players. It allows for near limitless cusomisation.

However, seeing as how Songbird is still relatively new on the scene, it's missing a few key features. There's no iPod Touch, iPhone or Zune support, has quite limited video support and it is not yet able to rip CDs.

Songbird Homepage

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Miro

When it comes to watching videos online, there are many different sites to choose from. And sometimes, it can be a bit of a chore finding the site that has the video you want.

Miro is a neat little application that gathers videos from all across the interwebs from websites like Youtube and Hulu, and collects them all in one easy to use programme. It can play almost any type of video. Much more than Quicktime can without Perian. It includes a great number of current TV programmes. E.g. 24, Heroes, The Simpsons etc., but sadly, most of these videos are available on Hulu.com, which is unavailable in the UK, but if you live in the United States, feel free to check this all out. And what's more, all of these videos can be downloaded!

Miro also works as a torrent application. Whenever an episode of a programme you like becomes available, it will automatically download and be ready to view.

Miro Homepage

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TubeTV

Youtube is, as people quite a bit cooler than me would say, "Da Bomb". I know it, you know it, everybody else knows it. My only gripe is that you can't go check out your favourite videos when out of range of an internet connection. And that's where TubeTV comes in.

TubeTV is a simple application that is used to download and convert any video off Youtube. All you need to do is enter the URL of the video you want, or just search it in the handy little search bar given, and then just click the 'grab' button. TubeTV will then download and convert the video for you.

For me, the downloading part has worked absolutely greatly, but the videos don't convert, and are left as flv files. These files can be viewed on many different applications. I recommend VLC Player, or alternatively, you can download Perian to view them using Quicktime.

TubeTV Website
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Handbrake

Wouldn’t it be just lovely to have your entire DVD library backed up onto a digital format, available for viewing at the click of a button?

Luckily, the good folks at Handbrake know this and have come up with this splendid piece of software. Handbrake can scan and convert any DVD into a digital format. At the current release, the supported formats are:

• .mp4

• .avi

• .mkv

• .ogm

There’s the option to fiddle with the properties of the file (bitrate, frame rate, encoder etc.) , but if all of this technical malarkey scares you, also included are a bunch of handy presets for different devices, e.g.: AppleTV, iPhone/iPod Touch, iPod, PS3, PSP, Xbox 360.

Handbrake Download Page (Latest Version)

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