I'm very picky when it comes to installing codec packs on my PC: I don't like bloating the system with useless files and tools that won't be of any use or will only cause incompatibility issues.

Luckily I don't have this problem with XP Codec Pack. This compact, handy codec pack has always been my first choice whenever I need to install codecs or upgrade them on any PC. Why? Well, I like the fact that XP Codec Pack focuses on the most popular formats, and so it's not overloaded with codecs most computer users will hardly use. Secondly, it's dead easy to install and lets you choose exactly what you want, both for codecs and tools. Finally, it's incredibly stable and highly compatible: I've never had a single problem with codec since I use it.

Of course, I'm by no means saying that XP Codec Pack is perfect. There are a few flaws that should be pointed out. The most demanding users will surely miss a wider array of formats, as well as more codec-related tools like the ones you find in other codec packs.

XP Codec Pack is a great choice for those who don't need a massive selection of codecs and prefer a simpler, hassle-free codec kit for the most popular audio and video formats.

Download XP Codec Pack 2.3.9 in Softonic

WinFF is the Windows version of one of the most popular video converters on Linux. It enables you to covert video files into several different video formats including Xvid and WMV.

WinFF has a basic GUI with a multitude of options and functionalities that will help you select the videos you need, previsualize them and define the format of the conversion. In addition, there are other specialised options such as the ability to change the ratio of the conversion, the resolution or the quality of the audio track.

Although WinFF is a fairly stable converter, it does struggle with long names especially those with unusual characters. To avoid problem, I advise you simply all of the names of the files that you want to convert. Otherwise, you might find that the program simply rejects the files for no apparent reason.

This is a convenient and quick file converter that still needs a few bugs ironing out before it would be my number one choice.

Download WinFF 0.42 in Softonic

Sometimes when you try to play music or a movie in your computer, you may find that either the image or the sound are not being properly played. These issues are probably a question of codecs, and you can solve them all with K-Lite Codec Pack.

This comprehensive kit includes all the codecs you need to have on your system if you want to play all audio and video formats without any problems. The full package includes quite a bunch of codecs, but the good thing is that you can choose which ones to install and which ones to leave out during the installation process.

Besides codecs, the K-Lite Codec Pack also includes several utilities that can come in very handy when dealing with audio and video files. Among others, you'll find tools to tweak and fix codecs, work with subtitles and obtain detailed information about any selected media file.

The only drawback I could point out about K-Lite Codec Pack is that it all may seem confusing for the novice user who doesn't really know what a codec is, and therefore can't really choose which ones to install. My advice here is to simply install all of them: it's the only way to make sure you'll be able to play pretty much any audio or video file on your PC.

K-Lite Codec Pack is a full featured collection of codecs that enables you to play just about any audio and video format on your PC without any problems.

Download K-Lite Codec Pack Full 3.9.5.0 in Softonic

There are so many video and audio formats that sometimes you need a helping hand just to know which codec you need to play that darn file that won't open up in your multimedia player.

This is where MediaInfo comes in handy, by analyzing any media file you open with it and displaying a complete report with all the information available about that specific file. This information includes basic data such as file name, playtime, file size and the likes, as well as more specific details like used codec, bitrate, channel, sample rate and resolution, among others.

The information provided by the program can be displayed in a variety of ways, from a basic data sheet or plain text to a tree-like structure or an HTML document. It can also be exported to a file but surprisingly enough there's no option to obtain a printed copy.

Also, I missed the possibility to obtain more information from the Internet (a web link would have been enough) or being able to download the necessary codec if it's not present in the system.

With MediaInfo you can obtain a complete report on any audio or video file, display it in several ways and also export it to several formats though it doesn't support printing and lacks some advanced functionality.

Download MediaInfo 0.7.7.2 in Softonic

Choosing a multimedia player used to be a real no-brainer. However, during recent times the raft of new features and updates added to classic media players like Winamp, Windows Media Player, and even iTunes have left the apps increasingly bloated. Far from being the slick, well-oiled machines they once were, these programs have been stuffed with so much that they are in danger of ending up like a sluggish, overweight athlete still holding on to past glories.

For those looking for a fresh alternative to these ballooning apps, The KM Player could be your ticket. The application has a small desktop footprint and its minimalist interface, somewhat akin to the original Winamp 5, means that access and playback are quick and hassle-free. Like Winamp, the interface is fully skinable, and there are some nice aesthetic touches, such as the changing of colour on the player with every new track. There are all sorts of options to help you pimp your player, such as visualizations, plug-ins and playback options, but the beauty of KM Player is that these are turned on at your request rather than being forced upon you at the outset.

The application handles both audio and video, and supports a wide range of different formats, meaning that once installed, you should never need to touch another player. Video playback is particularly impressive thanks to the range of processing tools available that allow you to sharpen, change picture properties, apply filters and even make video captures from within the program.

Download KMPlayer 2.9.3.1444 Beta in Softonic

ProgDVB is a piece of software which allows you to watch SAT-Television and listen to Radio channels directly from satellite by using DVB-PCI cards with hardware decoders on the board, SAT-dish, and personal x86-compatible computers. ProgDVB has options for working with network broadcasting and Audio/Video recording of the stream to different digital-media formats.

Download ProgDVB 5.15 in Softonic

Webcams are useful to have video chats with friends across thousands of miles – or maybe just a couple of blocks away – but they can also be used for other purposes.

One of them is capturing video right to your computer, something you can easily do with AMCap. This simple tool grabs the video signal coming from your webcam and records it straight away to your hard drive, in MPEG2 or AVI format, provided you have the necessary codecs. It features some other interesting options, such as the possibility to take screenshots or adding special effects to the image (graphic overlay, alpha-blending, transparency, etc.).

That said, I must confess I found AMCap a bit deceiving. Maybe I expected something else: a webcam monitoring tool or something similar. But I honestly don't find this program that useful. It doesn't even let you take screenshots automatically according to a certain lapse of time. Also, video files take a lot of room, so you better have a large hard drive ready for them.

AMCap is a simple tool that lets you capture video from your webcam for whatever purpose you may have. If you're searching for a webcam monitoring app, you'll need to look somewhere else.

Download AMCap 9.20 in Softonic

PSP is the classic Sony console that apart from running games, also allows you to play all kinds of videos, but unfortunately only in the native format of the console.

PSP Video 9 however allows you to convert any video format to PSP. The program has a wide variety of options that lets you select both the quality of video and sound and it includes an administrator to copy video created directly to the console. All you need is a USB cable and your PSP to transfer files to your console. However, as you'll see in the developer forum, nothing goes quite as planned with this program. Although files are transferred, frequently you won't be able to watch them which is what a lot of users are reporting. One of the problems is that files will frequently appear as 0KB and the developer suggest that it may be because your PSP memory is not "clean" enough for the program to need. What you'll need to do is reformat your entire PSP memory card which is a drastic step but seems to be the only way to get things going again.

If you've got a PSP, and want to watch movies and clips in other formats, this is an option although you may find it hit and miss.

Download PSP Video 9 2.17 Beta in Softonic

Playing Flash files is increasingly important because of the proliferation of sites such as YouTube and DailyMotion.

Flash Movie Player is absolutely free and as the developers say, has no nag screens, no ads, no spyware and no time limit. It gives you much greater control over Flash movies than most players, allowing you to rewind swf movies, animations and Flash games to any position in playing or paused mode. The program can extract Flash movies from EXE projector files and save them in SWF format plus it even allows you to compile playlists, sorting functions and has a full screen mode with an auto-hiding navigation bar which conveniently disappears when the movie is in full flow. In addition, you can create snapshots easily although your saving formats are limited to JPEG or BMP format. The program allows you to explore cached SWF files which means you can add SWF files from IE, Firefox and Opera's cache to your playlist. In addition, the program can even trigger a Flash Movie as your screen saver from a random selection of clips.

A great Flash player that gives you 100% full control over your playlists and file playing options.

Download Flash Movie Player 1.5 in Softonic

Although it might appear like some sort of Communist software, CCCP is actually just a pack of codecs to help just about any video run on your system.

The full title is the "Combined Community Codec Pack". In reality, it's more like a filter pack than a codec pack but the developers say that "filter doesn't begin with C and we wanted a good acronym"! For anyone who understands Russian, the developers also like to point out that the name is also a pun on the Russian name Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, which is transliterated into the Latin alphabet as "Soyuz Sovietskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik", or "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", abbreviated as "СССР" or "USSR". Anyway, the CCCP codec pack was created to replace the filter packs provided by other groups which simply often did not work properly or broke compatibility for other formats. In reality, it is an extremely powerful Codec pack, playing back effortlessly most popular formats and some unpopular ones too. There are now fiddly options to get it working although if you have other codec packs installed, you may experience some conflicts or significant slowdown in reproduction of your films.

However, overall, this is an impressive pack which deals with just about anything and I quite like the attitude of the developers and their ironic communist branding.

Download Combined Community Codec Pack 2008-01-24 in Softonic

Ripping CD's is increasingly difficult because of the protection that manufacturers place on the disks.

Now however, there are some programs strong enough to break that protection such as RipIt4Me. These encryption methods cannot be dealt with by most major DVD rippers and burners because they employ such encryption as ARccOS and RipGuard DVD techniques that totally immobilise programs such as DVD Shrink or DVD Decrypter. RipIt4Me is an incredibly powerful ripper which can handle just about any encryption. Of course, it should only be used for non commercial use - such as your own personal backups of your own commercial discs. The program is very simple to use with a "One Click" wizard to take you through the very simple ripping procedure which consists of little more than inserting a disc, browsing to a save location, and off you go. In it's latest incarnation, the program now has an automatic updater and an encryption decoder which detects whether the DVD appears to be protected or not. You'll see this displayed in the main window during the first step of the wizard.

This is a remarkably powerful ripping tool that can rip just about any copyrighted DVD (although not all) but only use it for your own backups.

Download RipIt4Me 1.7.1.0 in Softonic

Sometimes an image is worth a thousand words, and this is why videos are usually the handiest way to share a tip o create a tutorial.

Screen recording is child's play with TipCam. This program enables you to capture any activity that takes place on your screen and save it as an online video that you can share with anybody. You can show off your latest battles in your favorite game, or help a customer that needs assistance with a particular software application.

TipCam is very easy to use. You can enable, pause and resume screen recording with hotkeys, plus make the "camera" follow your mouse with its pan/zoom function, although there's no possibility to define the size of this zoom.

On the downside, the program only saves videos to FLV. That said, if you want to publish them online, you can use the developer's website - after signing up for free. While this can be a good way to share them, I'd still prefer having a wider format variety to save my videos.

With TipCam you can easily record any activity on your screen. Unfortunately videos are saved only in FLV format .

Download TipCam 1.0.55.1795 in Softonic

VirtualDub is a video capture and processing utility licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is designed to be a general utility that can trim and clean up video before exporting to tape or processing with another program. It does not possess the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video.

It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files, which you can extend with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is best at processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and handle BMP image sets.

Download VirtualDub 1.8.1 Stable in Softonic

Sometimes I prefer watching movies and TV series on the computer rather than doing it on the couch. The image quality in my PC monitor is better and I can handle more formats than just DVD.

Of course, I need a good video player in order to enjoy my favorite movies at their most, and my choice is no other than BSPlayer. This great video player features anything you need to watch movies or any other kind of video on your PC. It supports all popular video formats (and audio as well, in case you were wondering) and though its basic interface is not really the nicest one I've seen, you can easily customize it with skins.

BSPlayer supports video subtitles, takes screenshots of movie currently playing, lets you create bookmarks and chapters to move along videos more easily and has also support for plug-ins. I especially liked the way you can control playback, either by using keyboard shortcuts or simply your mouse: one click to stop the video, two clicks to go full screen, mouse wheel to raise or low the volume…

The only thing I didn't like was the fact that, being a free version, you're obliged to install an adware element on your PC that displays ads from time to time while you're browsing the way. It's a safe app that doesn't compromise your privacy, but still it's not my cup of tea. I guess it's just the price you have to pay for having such a great video player for free.

BSPlayer lets you enjoy your favorite movies on the PC with a wide range of features (subtitles, screenshots, bookmarks and more) provided you're willing to accept some ads on your desktop.

Download BSPlayer Free 2.28.964 in Softonic

One of the most frustrating things about video playback is when you don't have the right codecs installed.

SMPlayer attempts to do away with this problem completely by attempting to play videos regardless of the codecs they need. It does this by using the MPlayer engine which the developers claim can play almost all video formats. In reality, this is not always the case. What you may find is that if you're trying to play a WMV file protected by DRM for example, you will see snippets of the film but not the whole thing. However, the player has many other great features that make it an interesting proposition. One of the most useful is the way it remembers most of the settings of files that you play a bit like a DVD Player. If you turn off a film because you're a bit tired, when you open it later, it will start from exactly the same point where you left it with all the original settings including subtitles and audio. One other area where the player excels is in subtitling. SMPlayer allows you to choose subtitles in a variety of formats allowing you to choose the font, size, and even colors.

There are many other great aspects to SMPlayer - audio track switching, mouse scrolling and multiple speed playback - that on top of it's codec free playback, make it an excellent choice.

Download SMPlayer 0.6.1 in Softonic

There was a time when video files all conformed to some basic requirements and could be played without protest using any media software. As technologies change and licensing becomes more restrictive and specific, simply playing a video file has now become a challenge and thanks to the plethora of obscure proprietary formats now available, finding a media player that works for the majority has become more hassle than it’s worth. Thankfully the open source community have come up with a solution in the form of VLC, otherwise know as VideoLAN.

This cross platform player doesn't strike as particularly good-looking when put side by side with Windows Media Player or Winamp, but you'll appreciate its far superior usability within moments. Its power can be demonstrated with any video files you happen to be downloading, which can be played in whatever form they exist, be it an actual video format or an unclassified temporary one. As you preview a video, it will skip the parts that have yet to be downloaded and let you see the rest – Media Player in comparison, can't preview files in this way.

Apart from playing incomplete videos, because lets face it not many people want to do that anyway, VLC has support for a huge range of video formats. If it doesn't recognize the file type it will try playing it anyway often successfully or if it's an encrypted file it will display the scrambled video in its raw form. The interface is stripped down to the bare bones, with the apparent objective of making it as unobtrusive as possible. With superb hotkey support, you can do practically everything you want without touching your mouse.

Put simply, VLC is a video player that doesn't stray in to other areas. There is only one alternative skin available, but all it will take is one look and you'll quickly be switching back to the default.

This free player should appeal to true cinephiles who want as little distraction as possible from their viewing experience. Being open source it's free to use and thanks to a small file size and a friendly installation process, we would recommend it to absolutely everyone as their "backup" or "catch-all" video player.

Download VLC Media Player 0.8.6h in Softonic

There are literally dozens of options out there for FLV playback and FLVPLayer4Free tries to weigh in as one of the more customisable FLV players. Normally, FLV players are rather rudimentary affairs since Flash is not a particularly easy format to work with. However FLVPlayer4Free has tried to add some glitz to the Flash reproduction genre. Amongst many things, you can drag & drop FLV files straight into FLV player and save frames of your favourite films as images although only in three formats - JPG, PNG and BMP. You can instruct it to play in full screen mode and to stop anything else getting in the way of your viewing experience, keep the screen always in the foreground. There are a few limited volume settings including a mute option and you can also put FLV films or videos on a loop if you want. One very simple thing that I find many FLV players ignore is an elapsed time feature which is one thing that is included in FLVPlayer4Free. You can also play as many FLV files as you want at the same time although why anyone would want to do this, I'm not sure since you only have one soundcard to put it all through.

Overall, FLVPlayer4Free is one of the more comprehensive FLV Players on the market although I'm still awaiting the day when FLV players get really serious.

Download FLVPlayer4Free 2.9.0.0 in Softonic

In an age of multiple media players all with different codecs and formats, it's nice to know there's at least one out there that can play just about anything.

Haihaisoft Universal Player supports almost all popular digital media formats and can also play digital media files protected by DRM-X. Amongst the players it can emulate are Windows Media Player, Real Player, Adobe Flash Player, Apple QuickTime Player, PowerDVD and Flash Video (FLV) Player. Whatsmore though, this player embeds itself into Internet Explorer meaning that whenever you are presented with a format compatible with any of these file types, you can watch it instantly. The number of formats it can play is mind-boggling, including those protected by DRM such as WMV(Windows Media Video), WMA(Windows Media Audio), ASF, WMS, DVD, VCD, SVCD, MOV, RM, RMVB, AVI, MPEG, WMV, 3GP, FLV, SWF, MP3, AMR, M4A, ACC, OGG, MIDI, GIF and JPEG file format. Best of all, the program is constantly updated with the latest codecs so you don't need to worry about it suddenly not being able to play files.

A completely free player that supports just about any format imaginable and embeds itself into IE perfectly.

Download Haihaisoft Universal Player 1.0.7.1 in Softonic

Portable VLC media player is the popular VLC media player packaged as a portable app, so you can take your audio and video files along with everything you need to play them on the go. It reads all types of formats like MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD, WMV, DVDs, VCDs and streaming.

Download Portable VLC Media Player 0.8.6h in Softonic

The new QuickTime 7 Player not only delivers startling quality, but it's easier to use than ever. It requires no set up for content that streams over the network. Instead, QuickTime 7 Player automatically determines your system's connection speed and chooses the highest quality stream for the amount of bandwidth you have available. And if you ever lose a connection while watching streaming video, QuickTime 7 Player automatically reconnects. Now, that's convenience.

Do you think great video deserves great audio? We do, too. And QuickTime 7 Player delivers truly outstanding multi-channel audio. In fact, it provides you with up to 24 channels of audio, turning your home office into a home theater. Pop in a movie or video game that features surround sound and prepare to be amazed at the heightened audio experience you'll enjoy on your computer equipped with surround-sound speakers. A really good sport, QuickTime 7 Player supports a wide-range of industry-standard audio formats, including AIFF, WAV, MOV, MP4 (AAC only) and AAC/ADTS.

Download QuickTime 7.5 (Standalone player) in Softonic