Free SMS in India using 160by2.com

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160by2.com offers free sms up to 80 characters to be sent to any mobile number (Both GSM & CDMA) in India. With ads displayed on the rest 80 characters. It features fast sms delivery, online contacts/phonebook and SMS storage facility, free sms alerts (e.g. birthday alerts, reminders, IPL score update etc). It also features a free mobile Java application that can be installed in almost any phone with Java support and you can send free SMS via that mobile application using SMS or GPRS/EDGE/Internet.

Creating easy Gif animations using some free tools

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Gif is the most popular image format for animated pictures and logos. Gif animation is widely used in web animations, user avatars, smileys etc.

This guide will help you to create custom gif animations from slides of still pictures or video using GIMP and VirtualDub.

Creating Gifs using still pictures

Step 1

Open GIMP->then open the stills in GIMP using Open as Layers… option from File [Ctrl+Alt+O] and then browse and select the image files to be opened, click open.

Step 2

Press Ctrl+L to open the Layers window for viewing and applying delay to the slides/layers of images. This delay is the duration of time for which the layer will be displayed and after that next layer will be displayed.

Just right click each layer and then click Edit Layer Attributes… to enter a delay value.

e.g. if you wish to have a delay time of 500ms then enter it in this format (500ms) as Layer name.

Step 3

To preview the animation click Filters from GIMP menu bar, then select Animation->click Playback.

Now to save the animation click File->Save as->then give a file name of your choice and .gif as the extension name->click Save->select Save as Animation->then click Export->Save.

Creating Gif from Video

Step 1

Open VirtualDub->click File->Open a video file->then browse and select a video file, then click open to open it.

Step 2

To save the whole video as Gif animation click File->Export->Animated GIF.

* Saving a whole video as gif is not a good idea if the video is of long duration (greater than 2 min), because it require more time and storage space to encode and save the video as gif. So its better to choose a selection of video for exporting into gif animation.

Nokia Monitor Test - Tweak your monitor and get sharpest possible display

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Nokia Monitor Test the ultimate monitor calibration tool to tweak any type monitors and have the best possible display configuration. This tool supports adjustment of brightness, contrast, geometry (width, height, Tilt etc), color, readability etc.

It also got a little option for testing system sound configuration.

 

Nokia Monitor Test is no longer supported by Nokia and future development have been stopped, the final version is 1.0.0.1

Technorati Tags: Monitor Calibration,Tweak

Free unlimited sms to India using - Way2SMS

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Way2sms offers free and unlimited sms to any Indian mobile numbers (GSM & CDMA). Unlike other online free sms service providers Way2sms have no restrictions on amount of sms to be sent. Way2sms also have premium paid service where you can use your name as sender.

 

What’s is the best search engine? – Some more Google gags…

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Almost everybody knew about Google bombs, like if we search for "miserable failure", Google will brought up the official George W. Bush biography page to number 1 position among other all results.

Though at present many of these so called bombs are not available in search results.

I just thought to explore some more in this bombing aspect and all of a sudden decided to search for query “best search engine“ using Google search.

Guess what I got in the results…

As you can see Google Search isn’t visible in the results page, except something mentioning “Best US Shopping Search Engine Winner: Google's Froogle” and “www.dogpile.com” appeared in the top of all results.

Seeing these search results motivated me to search some more queries related to “best search engine”.

Look what I found….

Search Query “top search engine”

Once again “www.dogpile.com” appeared in top 3 and still no mention of “www.google.com”. Though two websites got the term Google.

Search Query “web search”

At last in this query “www.google.com” was visible, though in the 10th position…….

Once again “www.dogpile.com” was in the top.

Search Query “online search”

In this query AOL Search is the topper. I think that’s because AOL was formerly called America Online, Inc. and Google thinks it is what I am after.

In the end the tagline I got is “Google is too shy to show himself as best search engine in its own search results”.

I got these results because Google generally don’t manually modify it’s search results [visibility of a site in search results depend on their pagerank and some other criteria defined by Google].

So I hope I got something new similar to Google Bombs…….

Google Gags may be….

You may also try some more queries like “ultimate search engine”, “search engine”, “top 10 search engines” etc.

EyeDefender – avoid eyestrain and prevent Computer Vision Syndrome

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EyeDefender is a freeware which can protect your eyes from Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS).

CVS is a temporary condition resulting from focusing the eyes on a computer display for protracted, uninterrupted periods of time. Symptoms of CVS include headaches, blurred vision, neck pain, fatigue, eye strain, dry, irritated eyes and difficulty refocusing the eyes. These symptoms can be further aggravated by improper lighting conditions (i.e. bright overhead lighting or glare) or air moving past the eyes (e.g. overhead vents, direct air from a fan).

“EyeDefender can also help you prevent other problems related to computer use, which require a computer user to take short breaks. These problems include Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) or Occupational Overuse Syndrome (OOS), also known in the USA as Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) and in Europe - Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSD).”

EyeDefender runs automatically in the system tray and guides a computer user to take a break, when it’s really needed to protect your eyes from CVS.

I think EyeDefender is very useful software because nowadays many hardcore computer users (including me) often face these problems, though EyeDefender is only available for Windows based PCs.

 

DevalVR - view 3D Interactive Virtual Reality Panoramas

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DevalVR is a browser plugin for QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) files.

DevalVR features high quality viewing capabilities for panoramas in JPEG or QTVR format.

After installing the plugin view the above animated preview in its original 3D interactive format.

 

GrandCentral – One number to ring all your phones

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“GrandCentral: The New Way To Use Your Phones”

GrandCentral is a free service which allows it’s users to use a single number (GrandCentral no.) to route all the incoming calls to an user specified list of phone numbers. The user can specify these phone numbers depending on callers, time of day or personalized contact groups.

 

Main Features of GrandCentral

Control Your phones through the web	Personalize How to treat your callers	Explore New ways to use your phones
Screen Callers Know who's calling and screen unknown callers	Ring Different Phones One number that rings different phones based on who's calling	WebCall Button Let people call you from a web page without showing your number
ListenInTM Hear why someone is calling before taking the call	Greetings Personalize your voicemail greetings by caller or group	CallSwitch Switch phones in the middle of a call
Call Record Record calls on the fly and access recordings online	RingShareTM Go beyond the ring and choose ringback tones for your callers	Click2Call Call from your addressbook and save your typing
Block Callers Unwanted callers won't be able to reach you anymore		Mobile Access Visual voicemail for your mobile phone
Notifications Receive voicemail notifications via email or SMS

GrandCentral is in BETA and only available within US.

You can use this email notification option to get notified when GrandCentral service is available in your country.

 

Blue Screen of Death – get it on your PC

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The famous Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) or STOP error is a critical system error, which prevents your PC to boot into Windows and displays an error message like the above one.

Now you can get this error as a screen saver and use it to amaze your friends and scare your enemies!

Get BSoD

 

Twitter – What are you doing?

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Twitter a free social networking service that asks only one simple question “What are you doing now?” and allows it’s users to post updates or tweets as answer. These tweets are displayed on user’s profile page. Users can receive another users tweets by following them. These tweets can be delivered via twitter website, IM, RSS, e-mail, SMS. Several other applications such as Twitteroo, Twitbin, Twitterrific, Twitter Widget, twitter for Facebook etc offers twitter service on various platforms.

So why are you waiting?

Start using twitter and let the world know what are you doing now…

 

 

PookMail.com - disposable email account for Easy and Anonymous e-mail

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PookMail.com provides free and anonymous disposable email service.

Where anyone can create an email account @pookmail.com (e.g. xyz@pookmail.com) and then use it to receive emails and reply to received emails. User cannot send an email from his PookMail.com account to any email address or cannot compose new emails to be sent. I think this is done to stop PookMail.com users to spam or abuse PookMail.com services. Users just have to enter their username to log in or create a new account at PookMail.com (i.e. No password protection). You can receive your PookMail.com emails directly to your desktop via RSS feed.

i.e.

http://www.pookmail.com/rss/email_account.xml 

PookMail.com is like a disposable inbox because your account will deleted after 24 hours with all stored emails. So you must save important emails before that time.

So why use PookMail.com?

PookMail.com service is quite useful when you have to give your email id you unknown persons or web sites whom you don’t trust for spam or other reasons.

 

Windows 7 is going to be the successor of Vista

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Windows 7 code named Blackcomb and later Vienna is the next version of Windows as the successor to Windows Vista.

Windows 7 is expected to be released late 2009 or near January 2010. A server variant, code named Windows Server 7, is also under development.

 

BitThief – cheat BitTorrent, Steal Every Bit without uploading

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BitThief is a BitTorrent client developed by Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich, it offers torrent downloads without uploading (seeding). Its simply cheats the BitTorrent protocol, allowing it's users to download like a selfish giant. You may get better download speed with BitThief on well seeded torrents and slow internet connection (you will be able to use your full bandwidth for download), though just imagine if everybody starts using BitThief then the torrent itself will be dead.

BitThief poses a great threat to BitTorrent Peer 2 Peer (P2P) file sharing and can be considered as a torrent leeching client software. The point raised by the developers of BitThief is “We argue that the BitTorrent protocol has to be modified in order to effectively prevent selfishness.”

BitTyrant another torrent client similar to BitThief, though BitTyrant do seed, but only to the peers having high upload speeds.

Download BitThief

To use BitThief you must have Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed, because BitThief is Cross-platform and written in Java.

Get latest version of Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

 

ZSoft Uninstaller - Uninstall programs with ease

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Do you ever faced, that you’re unable to uninstall certain programs from Windows Add or Remove Programs options? Or you have uninstalled the program though it’s uninstall entry is still present in Add or Remove Programs.

The main causes of these errors are damaged installations or software bugs in the programs.

Many of us have faced these problems. There is one easy solution available to this problem, ZSoft Uninstaller allows you to easily uninstall programs and works as an alternative to Windows Add or Remove Programs option. You can also delete left over uninstall entries using this program.

If you are unable to uninstall a program, then just manually delete the files of that program from your HDD (generally from C:\Program Files) and then use Zsoft Uninstaller to remove the uninstall entry.

The main features or ZSoft Uninstaller are following:

Search (search the list of installed software)

Delete entry's from programs that is no longer installed

Automatically find entry's from programs that are most likely already uninstalled

Hide entries from the list that you are never going to uninstall (Windows updates etc.) making the list smaller and therefore easier to manage.

Automatically find entry's that are considered "crap-ware"

Export the current list to a TXT file

Show more information than available though add/remove

Find and delete temporary files

Analyse an installation so it can be completely uninstalled

 

Click here to download ZSoft Unistaller for free.

 

Click here to view ZSoft homepage (incase the above link changed/dead or you want to try other programs from ZSoft).

 

.kkrieger the 96K free first person shooter game

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.kkrieger is just 96KB in file size, though its a good and free alternative to other first person shooter games like Serious Sam which eats lots of MBs of your hard disk space. But you still need a good graphics card with at least pixel shaders 1.3 and 128 MB VRAM, 512MB or more RAM, 1.5Ghz Pentium3/Athlon or faster processor, DirectX 9.0b.

Click here to download .kkrieger and play it yourself.

 

Windows hibernation facts

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Many of us are unaware that Microsoft Windows has a option called hibernation. This allows you to save your current working session without closing a running program or file. Then you can resume that session anytime when you start your PC. It’s somewhat like the stand by mode of Windows. Though stand by mode requires power, so we can’t unplug the PC from power because doing so may result in data loss and the user will not be able to resume the session. Hibernation doesn’t require any power and uses the hard disk drive to store entire RAM contents. So how much disk space will hibernation eat depends on the size of RAM you have. Generally hibernation is faster than regular shut down and start up. 

In Windows XP hibernation is hidden and can be enabled by the following process:

Right click on your desktop->click Properties->Screen Saver->Power->Hibernate->tick Enable hibernation->Apply.

Now after enabling hibernation to hibernate instead of regular shutdown, press the Shift key when the Turn off computer option appears on screen.

Beijing Olympic 2008 goes Hi-Tech

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Beijing Olympic 2008 will use latest cutting edge technology for athletes, visitors, surveillance and broadcasting. The whole event will be produced and broadcasted in high-definition television with support from Panasonic. Also the live broadcast will be available on internet and text alerts and video feeds are available for mobile users. Those who miss the action don’t have to wait for repeat telecast; they can easily watch it on online video sites like YouTube. The use of Wi-Fi and other wireless technologies has broadened the surveillance network. Also China will offer 3G services during Olympics, though it will be only for Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games (BOCOG) affiliated persons who got one of the 15,000 handsets of Samsung, which Samsung (one of the sponsor of the game) gave to BOCOG and so international 3G handset users will not be able to use their handsets in Beijing. The official web site of Beijing Olympic 2008 has an IPv6 version of the site.

sources: Computerworld ,Wikipedia.

iPhone 3G launched and soon will be in India

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Apple has released its iPhone 3G model this month, with all new iPhone 2.0 software preloaded and with 10 hours of 2G and 5 hours of 3G talk time. Indian cellular giant Airtel announced that it will launch iPhone 3G in Indian markets very soon…

Google Lively launched

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Google has recently launched Lively, a 3d virtual online chat platform in which users can choose a avatar to chat. It’s completely different from Google Talk or Orkut. It’s like a virtual world for you and it’s very addictive.

Click here to give a try to Lively. Still it’s in beta as usual to the new launches of Google.

Airtel GPRS/EDGE mobile internet in India

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Bharti Airtel is one of the leading GSM mobile service provider providing mobile internet service via GPRS/EDGE in India. Airtel offers data transfer speeds up to 58 kbps via GPRS and up to 230kbps via EDGE network. All major cities are already covered by EDGE. Though to get EDGE speeds in EDGE covered areas you need to have an EDGE supporting handset.

Configuration settings for Airtel GPRS/EDGE:

Mobile Office

Account Name:	Airtel_MO (or any thing you like)
Access point name(APN):	airtelgprs.com
username and password:	blank
use proxy:	no

You can also send “MO” as sms to toll free no. 2567 to get Mobile office settings Over The Air (OTA) directly delivered to your phone.

NOP(Net On Phone)/Airtel Wap

Account Name:	Airtel_NOP (or any thing you like)
Access point name(APN):	airtelwap.com
username and password:	blank
use proxy:	yes
proxy:	100.1.200.99
port:	8080

You can also send “NOP” as sms to toll free no. 2567 to get Mobile office settings Over The Air (OTA) directly delivered to your phone.

Airtel Live

Account Name:	Airtel_Live (or any thing you like)
Access point name(APN):	airtelfun.com
username and password:	blank
use proxy:	yes
proxy:	100.1.200.99
port:	8080

You can also send “LIVE” as sms to toll free no. 2567 to get Mobile office settings Over The Air (OTA) directly delivered to your phone.

You can use the Mobile Office service in both PC and mobile. To use Mobile Office in PC you have to create a dial up internet connection and you have to use *99# as dial up number.

View/Recover User Ids, Passwords, Product Keys - Saved in your PC

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A nice set of software tools provided by Nir Sofer can help you to view or recover your user ids and passwords stored in Internet Explorer, Outlook, Thunderbird, Instant Messengers like MSN, Gtalk, Yahoo! (5.x and 6.x versions only) etc. You can also extract user info like product key and Id of Windows, MS Office, Exchange Server and SQL Server installed in your PC. 

Mail PassView: The tool needed to view or recover Email client software (Outlook, Thunderbird etc) stored ids and passwords.

To view/recover ids and passwords stored in a IM client (Gtalk, Yahoo!, MSN etc) you can use MessenPass.

To view/recover product keys and Ids you can use ProduKey.

To view/recover Internet Explorer Stored id and passwords you need IE PassView.

You can download these and lots of other id password recovery tools like these from www.nirsoft.net.

*Note: These tools don't contain any trojan/virus and these are not hack tools which can send recovered ids and passwords over Internet. Some anti-virus programs may detect these tools as virus or hack tools, you can ignore these warnings.

Evernote - Remember Everything....

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Evernote is a note taking software/service. It’s useful for students, writers, bloggers and general people who needs to organize their notes and writings. Evernote features capturing of web pages, drag n drop files, Universal Clipper, handwritten notes, handwriting recognition, image and audio file adding to a note. Evernote has online synchronization option which stores all your notes to your Evernote online account, using this feature you can use Evernote on any computer/web supported devices and access your notes any where any time.
It also has offline client (software) support for Windows, Mac, and Windows Mobile and soon Mobile Java and iPhone support will be added. It’s like endless tape for storing notes, so don't forget any thing Remember Everything....
Latest 3.x version is in beta mode and online account is invitation only.
Click here for download and more info.

Orkut Themes

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Finally Orkut themes are officially launched. There are lots of cool themes to choose from and some more will come soon. You can choose themes from the home of your Orkut page (by clicking themes option on top).

Windows XP Service Pack 3 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 released

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Recently on (6th may 2008) Microsoft officially releases Windows XP service pack 3. It can be downloaded from Microsoft Download Center.

BitMeter - Monitor and Control your Internet/Network usage

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BitMeter is an internet/network connection monitoring software with a good set of features which will allow you to keep track your internet/network speed and usage. It displays a graphical box in your desktop and shows your

current network usage using graphs in that box. You can define custom position and size of the box in your desktop. You can also define custom colors for download, upload, graph background etc in the graph [here Red is showing download speed and green is showing upload speed].

You can define these settings from the tray icon of BitMeter. To check your network usage status of current day just point the mouse pointer to BitMeter tray icon and it will show your current download [DL] and

upload [UL] speed and total amount of downloaded and uploaded data.

 

With BitMeter you can check your hourly/daily/monthly network activity statistics with details of uploaded and downloaded amount of data and speed. You can also export network usage activity history in CSV format.

For those who have ISP Restrictions (e.g. maximum free bandwidth available per month, available total bandwidth per week etc) BitMeter features a ISP Restrictions option which allows you to set your maximum limit for downloaded data or total uploaded and downloaded data. When you reach near or cross that limit BitMeter alerts you by playing alert sound and text.

BitMeter also allow you to monitor your connection speed and network usage statistics remotely via a normal web browser [e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox] by running a web server. This feature is called Web Interface of BitMeter. Though the Web Interface is not activated by default you have to enable it from Settings>Web Server>tick Run Web Server to start the Web Interface.

It also features some other handy tools like custom Alerts [e.g. plays alert text and sound when you downloaded/uploaded certain amount of data in a predefined time], Stopwatch [shows the total amount of data uploaded and downloaded while the stopwatch was running], Calculator [which allows you to calculate estimated download/upload time of predefined data size and network speed or how much data can be uploaded/downloaded in certain time and speed] etc.

BitMeter is a freeware and available in two versions BitMeter II and BitMeter. BitMeter II got all the features mentioned above and requires .Net Framework to be installed. The second one only got some basic features like showing download and upload speeds, tray icon etc and does not require .NET Framework to be installed and uses less memory and little less CPU than BitMeter II.

Libra - organize your stuff, beautifully

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Libra is a new and innovative library management software for Microsoft Windows. Though it’s still in beta mode but the software is pretty much powerful and user-friendly to manage your media library. It has the ability to download media information and album arts from Amazon.com database and you can add media using search from Amazon.com database or by manual input, you can also import your previous library database directly into Libra (Delicious Library, Library Thing, Generic Excel (v2003 and above)/Text files, DVD Profiler v3) . It features a webcam barcode scanner, which allows you to use your webcam as a barcode scanner, by using this feature you can add media to Libra automatically by pointing your webcam to the barcode of your media. It also supports using of regular barcode scanners. Using Libra you can track who borrowed your media and what's the check out date, due date etc. You can export your Libra database to Web Export, Excel Export or in text CSV format.

The most interesting thing about Libra is that it is a freeware for non-commercial use.

Download Libra and give it a try.

Library Management Software

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Library management software helps you to correctly and easily manage, categorize and update your collection of media (e.g. books, DVDs, music and games).

Managing your media library

You can use any spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice

Calc etc for basic cataloging of your media collection. You also can use database software like Microsoft Access, OpenOffice Base etc.

Though there are some software programs that are dedicated to library management like Delicious Library(for Apple Macintosh), Libra (for Microsoft Windows) etc.

Software used by organizations to manage their media library

Many organizations like public libraries used to have customized library management software, which is specially developed and designed by a software company hired by that organization.

Media Players - The Complete Definition

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We mainly use media players to play audio/video contents like VCDs, DVDs, AudioCDs, Audio/Video files (e.g. avi, mp3, wma, wmv etc) etc. Nowadays you have many options to choose from a wide range of software media players. Some of these media players are designed for some specific media e.g. DVD players, video players, audio players, multimedia players etc. Though you may have some preinstalled media player software by your Operating Software (OS) e.g. Microsoft Windows Xp comes with preinstalled Windows Media Player.

So why do we need a media player if one is preinstalled?

The answer is simple, your preinstalled media player maybe fine in playing certain media formats but may not be able to play some media formats or you can avail better: audio/video quality, features (e.g. frame capture, recording, zoom etc), graphical user interface (GUI) etc by using some other software media player.

Media player Categories                        

There are mainly three types of media players for playing audio/video contents.

1. DVD player

2. Audio player

3. Multimedia player

DVD player

These types of media players are specially created to play DVD video from a DVD video disc or DVD video content lying on Hard Disk Drive (HDD). These media players have special options like DVD menu navigation, subtitle, DVD bookmark to resume playback (resumes playback from where it was stopped or terminated), DVD audio decoding capability (e.g. DTS audio, Dolby Digital audio), deinterlacing etc. Some of the popular DVD player softwares are PowerDVD, WinDVD and DVD X Player etc.       

Audio player

These types of media players are specially designed to play audio cds and audio files. These media players have lots of special features like playlist, media library, graphical equalizer, audio file tagging, rating for songs, visualization etc. Some of the popular audio player software are Winamp, foobar2000, Microsoft Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, Apple iTunes etc.

*Note: These media players mentioned above may also play other multimedia items but they are sorted for their popularity in playing certain media and they also may have good multimedia playability.

Multimedia player

These are the media player software that can play any type of media and are not specially designed to play certain types of media. They can play from audio/video files to online audio/video streaming. Some popular multimedia player softwares are VLC media player, GOM player, BS.Player etc.

*Note: These multimedia players are also good video players. The video player is not on the categories because almost all multimedia players play video media with almost same features. DVD players are specially designed to play DVD video.