Design & Multimedia

Editorial Review of DVD Shrink

Here's one for anyone who wants to make backup copies of their DVDs on their hard disk. That way, you can use Windows Media Center or another DVD media player to play the DVDs on your PC. The program lets you rip the DVD to your hard disk in a variety of formats, including a lossless one that keeps the image and audio quality intact. You can choose from other formats if you want to save hard disk space. And you can also customize the quality on any DVD you rip.

DVD Shrink will preserve all your DVD content, including menus, trailers, subtitles, and so on. If you'd like, though, you can eliminate any of that content as well. Maybe best of all, it's free.

Note: This program is donationware. It is free to try, but the author accepts and encourages donations towards further development.

Description of DivX Play Bundle v6

Watch movies that have been compressed using DivX, and create your own DivX files from DVDs or other digital video files saved on your PC. DivX uses MPEG-4 format, which allows videos to be compressed to about 15 percent of the size of a standard DVD. This in turn lets you fit your videos on a Zip disk, burn them on a CD, upload them to a file sharing network, or play them over the Web. Because of MPEG-4's ability to compress video so powerfully, some call it "the MP3 of the video world."

Description of LimeWire Basic

LimeWire is a popular peer-to-peer file sharing program using the Gnutella network that supports a wide range of languages and operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.