Open Broadcaster Software – Professional Screencasting Utility

One of the biggest trends in gaming over the last few years has been screencasting—broadcasting your screen online in real-time as you play. Whether you're a pro or just getting started, it's a great way to get feedback. To get started with screencasting, try Open Broadcaster Software. It's got all the tools you'll need to stream anything, including full-screen games, windowed games, and even your desktop.

What is OBS?

Open Broadcaster Software is free and open source software for recording and live streaming. Source code is available to everyone to contribute and improve. Both 32 and 64 bit versions are available and it's absolutely free.

The application offers support for various streaming services, such as Twitch, iNSTAGIB.tv, DailyMotion, CashPlay, YouTube, CyberGame and Hitbox. It can help you record videos from various sources; you can integrate image slideshows, texts, game captures and webcam streams in the output, as well as record a running application on your desktop.

You can easily change the order of the sources, adjust their position on the screen (center, align left or right etc.), remove or rename a source. The preview function enables you to take a look at the generated video before proceeding to actually broadcasting it online.

The application features video and audio encoding options, allowing you to set the quality balance, the maximum bitrate and customize the buffer size. Additionally, you can change the streaming resolution and choose the monitor to stream from, adjust the FPS rate and customize the streaming delay.

Other options are related to configuring the microphone settings (mute / unmute, auxiliary boost, time offset, push-to-talk and more), changing the audio-video options (modifying the keyframe interval, using custom x264 encoder settings, customizing the global audio time offset, using microphone QPC timestamp).

Settings profiles can be created and saved for later loading and the application can be instructed to automatically reconnect to the target server.

Screenshots

Program review (Softpedia): http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/Other-Internet-Related/Open-Broadcaster-Software.shtml

Developers’ website: http://obsproject.com/

Direct download (installer): http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/obsproject/OBS_0_591b_Installer.exe

Direct download (portable version): http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/obsproject/OBS_0_591b.zip

Detailed tutorial: http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1262922-open-broadcaster-software

Jaangle Free Portable Music Player and Organizer

Jaangle (formerly Teen Spirit) is open source, free, music player and organizer software. It categorizes your mp3, ogg, wma, avi etc collection and displays it in easy to browse, user interface. It has a quality audio - video player and also an integrated tag editor.

Description

Jaangle has an intuitive and user-friendly interface for playing music, an excellent library for music managing, and very interesting download capabilities of artist photos/bios, song lyrics, etc.

You start by adding a folder which contains your music files (mp3, wma, avi, mpg etc). Jaangle scans and reads the available tag info. The artists appear in the tree like control. Each time you click on an artist all his tracks can be seen in the list pane, artist biography and image are automatically downloaded from the internet and displayed in the information pane. By double clicking a track in the list you hear the music playing. More info may appear (if available) in the info pane like lyrics or comments.

Jaangle is a Microsoft © Windows software application and it is tested in Windows XP/2003, Vista. It is certified by softpedia as 100% free of malware, including adware, spyware, viruses, trojans and backdoors.

License: Open source (GPL) free software (Freeware).

Main Features

* Media Player. Jaangle is using minimal resources (memory, CPU) for playing audio files based on the excellent bass engine. It plays video files using the DirectShow filters. By default it crossfades between tracks.

* Supported Audio Formats: mp3, mp2, wma, cda, ogg, mp1, aiff, xm, it, s3m, mod, mtm, umx, mo3, mpc, flac, mid, midi, ac3, mp4, ape, m4a and more based on directshow filters installed.

* Supported Video Formats: mpg, avi, mpeg, wmv, mp4 and more based on directshow filters installed.

* Music file tag editor (mp3, mpc, wma ...). You can tag files easily by right clicking in each track and click "properties". Alternatively you can drag-drop a track over a different artist/album/genre/year in the tree control. There are more ways to mass-tag your tracks by changing Artist / Album properties or by multiple select many tracks.

* Management. You can view your collection in various ways like Artists / Album, Year / Albums and more. Sorting is also available for every item type.

* Information downloading. By default, Jaangle, automatically downloads information from various sources in web. It is able to download information from Amazon (Album covers / Album reviews), LastFm (Artist Bio / Artist photo / Album covers), and Google (Track lyrics).

* History Logging. Jaangle automatically keeps log of the music you play. Note that it logs it only if you fully listen the track. You can see the full log of all the tracks that you have played and also track / artist statistics like top 10 per year/month etc.

* Info Display. Detailed information is displayed is the bottom right panel. It shows the artist (picture / bio) or the album (cover / review). By clicking the config button (the second icon in the title bar) you can choose to display visualizations/video or a web browser.

* Advanced Searching

* Visualization. Jaangle uses the excellent WinAmp's avs for displaying visualizations. You can add more visualization by adding visualizations scripts in the avs subdirectory.

* Game. Jaangle feature some variations of a music quiz game (it is inspired from my iPod) and the interface reminds "who wants the millionaire" TV game.The general idea is to select as quickly as possible the correct track that you listen. The games feature a total available time, a bonus in a correct answer, and a penalty in a mistaken one.
* And more…

Developers Website: http://www.jaangle.com

Direct Downloading Link (portable version): http://www.jaangle.com/files/jfiles.zip

Improve Productivity - Quickly Process Files and Folders with Predefined Actions

DropiIt is an open source tiny freeware utility to automate sorting and filing data-files and folders. No, it probably, will not perform any operations with your data, that you cannot do already with tools, built in your Operating System. But, using DropIt, you may significantly improve your productivity and complete some daily routine operations smarter and faster.

When you need to organize files, DropIt can eliminate much of the drudgery of searching and manually opening folders and moving files around.

You can configure DropIt to do 9 different predefined actions to be performed with your files and folders (Move, Copy, Compress, Extract, Rename, Open With, List, Delete and Ignore), filtering files by name, extension, location, size and/or date. You can even save sets of patterns in profiles and associate a profile to each desired folder, to scan monitored folders at a defined time interval.

You might need to review the background basic rules to perform the actions, and configure the utility for your convenience. And then the operation is simple and straightforward. Just drag and drop file or a group of assorted files and/or folders on the floating DropIt image and program will sort them automatically to defined destination folders, eventually compress or extract them, open them with associated programs or do other desired defined actions. As result, you save time on this routine operation, and the consistency of your data following the rules, improve.

Main Features

* Process files and folders manually with Drag-and-Drop
* Process files and folders automatically with Folder Monitoring
* Filter files and folders by name, extension, location, size and/or date
* Move, Copy, Compress, Extract, Rename, Open With, List, Delete, Ignore actions
* Collect patterns in different profiles and assign an image to each one
* Support also Context-Menu, Send-To and Command-Line
* Support automatic software update
* Support encryption to protect your profiles with a password
* Support internal, system and custom environment variables
* Support log file creation to verify sorting operations
* Support for Unicode encoding
* Available with Multi-language interface
* Available in both installer and portable versions

* Automatic updates function is available

Website: http://www.dropitproject.com/

FreeFileSync: powerful folder comparison and synchronization tool

This open source folder comparison and synchronization tool will compare files by scanning their contents or by file size and date; it can synchronize files and subfolders, process multiple pairs of folders at once, load/save folder comparison sessions, create batch jobs that can be run from the command line, and can handle cloned files (i.e. symbolic links or junctures). It also allows for custom syncing rules and command line option.

The utility has easy to understand, intuitive, interface with the two-pane “visual comparison” abilities.

Key Features

• Compare files (bytewise or by date) and synchronize them.
• No limitations: An arbitrary number of files can be synchronized.
• Unicode support.
• Network support.
• Built-in support for very long filenames (more than MAX_PATH = 260 characters).
• Synchronization database for propagation of deleted files and conflict detection
• Support for multiple folder pairs with distinct configuration
• Full support for Windows/Linux Symbolic Links and Windows Junction Points.
• Lean & easily accessible UI: Highly optimized for speed and huge sets of data.
• Algorithms coded in C++ completely.
• All progress indicators optimized for maximum performance!
• Create Batch Jobs for automated synchronization with or without GUI.
• Focus on usability:
• Only necessary functionality on UI: no overloaded menus or icon jungle.
• Select all folders via drag & drop.
• Last used configuration and screen settings are saved automatically.
• Maintain and load different configurations by drag & drop, load-button or commandline.
• Double-click to start external application (e.g. show file in Windows Explorer)
• Copy & paste all grid data as text
• Delete superfluous/temporary files directly on main grid.
• Right-click context menu.
• Comprehensive status information and error reporting
• Sort file-lists by name, size or date.
• Support for filesizes larger than 4 GB.
• Option to move files to Recycle Bin instead of deleting/overwriting them.
• Ignore directories "\RECYCLER" and "\System Volume Information" with default Filter. (Windows only)
• Localized versions are available for many languages.
• Delete before copy: Avoid disc space shortages for large sync-jobs.
• Filter functionality to include/exclude files from synchronization (without requiring a re-compare!).
• Include/exclude specific files from synchronization temporarily.
• Automatically handle daylight saving time changes on FAT/FAT32 volumes.
• Portable version available (selectable via installer).
• Native 64-Bit version.
• Check for updates from within FreeFileSync automatically.
• Copy locked files using Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service. (Windows only)
• Create regular backups with macros %time%, %date% within directory names
• Copy file and folder create/access/modification times when synchronizing
• Advanced locking strategy to allow multiple synchronization processes (e.g. multiple writers, same network share)

Website: http://freefilesync.sourceforge.net/

AlbumSharper - Advanced Digital Photos Organizer

Album Shaper strives to be one of the friendliest, easy to use, free, and open source applications for organizing, annotating, framing, enhancing, stylizing, and sharing your digital photos. Album Shaper embraces open formats like XML, JPEG, and XSLT, while supporting Windows, Mac OS X and Unix users.

What can you do with Album Sharper?

Annotating Photos

Album Shaper provides possibly the easiest way to annotate your photos. To add a photo description, simply click the info button and watch your photo grow in place and provide a place to enter or short or long description. When you're done just click off the photo. Power users will enjoy driving this entire process using Home, Esc, ←, →, ↑ and ↓ keys.

Framing

At the heart of Album Shaper 2's editing enhancements is a completely rewritten selection system. You can now select regions of the image using common aspect ratios or your display resolution. Selections can be dragged around, scaled in place, and rotated about their centers. You can drag any selection edge or corner too. If you want to crop the image, just select what you want and click the crop button.

Correcting Tilt

The new correct tilt feature helps straighten your photos in a snap. Album Shaper doesn't need you to carefully tell it how much to rotate your photo by dragging a slider or, heaven forbid, typing in the number of degrees. Instead, just identify what should have been a vertical or horizontal edge and you're done.

Histogram Editing, Brightness, and Contrast

While Album Shaper provides a number of automatic image fixing tools such as color and contrast correction and red-eye reduction, sometimes it is necessary to directly edit the image histogram. Using Album Shaper's novel "split-view" interface, you can quickly enhance your images and see the results side by side with the original form in real time.

Image Previews

It is pretty common to have a directory full of files that have similar names. Now you can pick out the ones you want before you add them using the new file preview functionality. In addition seeing what photos look like, you'll the image resolution, type, and size.

Developer’s website: http://albumshaper.sourceforge.net/

Free FTP Client – FileZilla – At Glance

The FTP is not dead yet! It is pretty much alive! This file transfer protocol may seem old-fashioned and ancient, but the truth is, it's often the simplest way to transfer files between PCs, or between a PC and a server. It is not only the best solution for webmasters for sites update, but every computer user might find it extremely useful in one or another situation.

It's especially useful for transferring large files, because ISPs often block email attachments over a certain size. It is also great for transferring groups of files. If you need to share a big chunk of data, the web uploading might take hours, while FTP can manage the same task much faster.

FileZilla is powerful Open Source FTP/SFTP client with multiple useful features. It includes a site manager to store all your connection details and logins as well as an Explorer style interface that shows the local and remote folders and can be customized independently. The program offers support for firewalls and proxy connections as well as SSL and Kerberos GSS security. Additional features include keep alive, auto ascii/binary transfer, download queue, manual transfers, raw FTP commands and more.

It has just about every FTP feature you need. It's a breeze to set up and edit new FTP connections. The interface is particularly easy to use, so that you can easily navigate external FTP servers and your local hard drive, and transfer files between then. You can also use multiple simultaneous connections to speed up file transfers.

Among others, the features of FileZilla include the following:

• Easy to use
• Supports FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)
• Cross-platform. Runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X and more
• IPv6 support
• Available in many languages
• Supports resume and transfer of large files >4GB
• Tabbed user interface
• Powerful Site Manager and transfer queue
• Bookmarks
• Drag & drop support
• Configurable transfer speed limits
• Filename filters
• Directory comparison
• Network configuration wizard
• Remote file editing
• Keep-alive
• HTTP/1.1, SOCKS5 and FTP-Proxy support
• Logging to file
• Synchronized directory browsing
• Remote file search

Screens:

Based on the Operation System, you can choose the appropriate download link from the following page:

http://filezilla-project.org/download.php?type=client

This free software is indeed features-rich, easy to use, and very reliable. This is actually the FTP software I am using on the daily basis. Highly recommended!

OpenOCR Freeware Utility from Cognitive Technologies

In our modern world, simple retyping documents into a computer is absolutely inefficient process, as it takes your valuable time, you can spend for more important tasks. Besides, when the paper document includes images and other elements of decoration, you will not be able to copy them easily into the computer file without scanning. OpenOCR (CuneiForm) is offering you an advanced and automatic way to convert a paper copy of the original document, including images, tables, columns, paragraphs, indentions, font styles and sizes, into identical soft copy.


OpenOCR has been developed by Cognitive Technologies, famous Russian software development company, offering a serious competition to the Abbyy Fine Reader – commercial product. It combines broad experience acquired by Russian scientists with the most advanced achievements in the field of optical recognition as cognitive analysis algorithm, adaptive recognition of characters, meridian segmentation of tables, neuron nets, etc. The software was released to the users as freeware in December, 2007. In September 2008, part of Cuneiform was released as open source software.

CuneiForm is the OmniFont system. Algorithms used in CuneiForm come from the rules of writing of letters, from their topology, and do not require definition of patterns or teaching. CuneiForm recognizes any printing fonts (scanned books, newspapers, magazines, output from laser and dot-matrix printers, text from typewriters, etc.). It does not recognize handwritten or pseudo-handwritten text nor does it recognize decorative fonts (e.g. Gothic). There are special settings in CuneiForm for recognition of text from dot-matrix printer and 200x100 DPI resolution faxes. CuneiForm can save text formatting and recognizes complicated tables of any structure.

Other Features

1. Support of 20 languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Mixed Russian-English, Ukrainian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Serbian, Croatian, Polish and others. Every language is supplied with a dictionary which lets do a context check of recognized characters and improve the recognition results.

2. Using built-in text editor, you can easily work with images, tables, columns, various fonts, headers and footers, if manual interaction is needed. Built-in wizards guide you through all stages of scanning and recognition and help to reach the final recognition goal quickly and with high quality and accuracy.

3. Recognition of tables of different structure even with cells not separated by lines.

4. Improved automatic and semiautomatic searching of text, tables and images, which makes the work with documents of complex structure highly flexible, it has also powerful means of manual fragmentation.

5. Ensures scanning from remote scanner in a local network. There can be only one scanner in office, but it can be used by any user in the organization.

Website: http://en.openocr.org/

Download: http://www.cuneiform.ru/downloads/setup_openocr_cuneiform_eng.exe

Kurt Computer Recorder

Krut Computer Recorder is a free open-source screencast tool, written in Java, to record audio and video from your computer screen into .mov-files and .wav-files. It can be used to multiple educational, commercial, and sharing with friends purposes, e.g. making video tutorials or recording games. It could also be used to record streaming video and audio directly from your computer.

In addition to a movie file, the program also records separate files for audio (wav) and video (mov), to allow re-encoding to any movie format using an external encoding program.

Additional Features:

- Timer-controlled recording
- Moveable recording areas during recording
- Preview of ongoing recording
- Optional mouse pointer recording
- Record/Playback at 2 different frame rates
- Highly accurate audio-video synchronization

Running Krut on Windows

Here are some quick instructions on how to run the program on the newer versions of Windows. You need to have Java installed, but there is a good chance that you already do. To run the program, it is usually sufficient to just double click on "KRUT.jar" or "krut.bat", after you have extracted the zip-archive into a folder of your choice. If you double click "KRUT.jar", and the program doesn't start, but you get a list of programs to choose from instead, you should choose the one that says "Java (something)". If double clicking does not work at all, try right clicking and see if there are any "Open With"-alternatives. If there is an "Open With -> Java (something)" alternative, that should do it.

If there is no "Open With" alternative when you right click, try to hold down a Shift-button while you right click, and see if there is an "Open With" alternative now.

If none of this works, there is probably some problem with your Java-installation. Go to a Java download site (at the time of writing http://www.java.com/getjava), and download and reinstall your Java.

Authors

The program has been written by Jonas Östby, with contributions by Kristoffer Berggren.

Website: http://krut.sourceforge.net/

Screenshot:

WinPenPack - free portable software collection

I love portable software. It means computer Windows programs that does not require installation or un-installation, and are executed on host PC without leaving tracks of their execution neither in the system folders of the Operating system, nor in the registry. They can be run from slave HDD, network, CD or DVD, or USB, as the most mobile storage carrier. In this post, I want to introduce one of the leading Italian Web Sites, providing an excellent source for the free portable applications to its users. Programs are subdivided in categories and executable through a practical menu, analogue to Windows Quick Launch, the winPenPack Launcher. WinPenPack suites are available in the following editions: Flash Essential, Flash 1Gb, Flash School, Flash Web and Flash Game.

Besides WinPenPack application, Web Site presents a respectable collection of the X-Softwares, are created and developed by winPenPack Team. Each X-Software is composed by a launcher, X-Launcher, that allow to modify program startup options for originally non portable programs to make them portable, through an .ini configuration file. X-Softwares, X-Launchers and .ini files created for portabilize programs are exclusive work of winPenPack development Team, and constitute integrant part of winPenPack.
Highly recommended for all computer freaks!!!

Access the Web Site software downloading section through the link: http://www.winpenpack.com/main/download.php

Enhance Automatic Translation with Freeware Translate.Net

If you ever tried to use online machine translation service from the language you understand, you know how funny and inaccurate the translation is performed. However, in many cases, when you need to get a main idea of the foreign language site, it will be good enough, definitely, much better than no translation at all. However, the question is naturally raised if the automatic translation can be improved, bringing more accurate results. Translate.Net, a free Windows translation aggregator is a desktop application offering the results from different language translation engines and dictionaries, letting you compare obtained results.

There are 17 services, 35 languages, and 1352 translations directions supported by the software with GUI localized to French, Chinese, Ukrainian and Russian. The program remembers your recent translation directions and allows saving your previous choice for the next session.

Note, that the software requires permanent Internet connection for processing of queries and retrieving translating results.

More information and source for downloading: http://translateclient.googlepages.com/index.en.html