FREE
COMMAND LINE UTILITIES
...because real programmers use the command line!
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Info-Zip
UPX EXE Packer
| UPX v1.25w (local copy)
An excellent, easy-to-use, seamless, executable packer to tame
those bloated .EXE files. |
UUDeview
Secure Shell (ssh.org)
Wget home page
Unix-style command archive
| Here,
you'll find numerous Win32 ports of GNU/Unix utilities. I have a local,
more dated (Jan 2002) copy of many unix-style Win32 commands
here (w/src, includes grep, diff,
make, tar, touch, head, tail, compress, gzip, zoo, and which, plus
rsxnt.dll, which is needed to run some of the commands. I recommend
putting all of these files in a directory in your path.)
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| COMMERCIAL UTILITIES |
Easyplot
| I don't
usually like to recommend a commercial package, but this is an exception.
Easyplot is an excellent, intuitive plotting program geared towards
scientific plotting, data analysis, and curve fitting. It is what
Gnu-plot should have been, and
it is proof that good Win32 programs can still come in
small, efficient packages (total disk footprint < 1 MB).
Try it and you'll be hooked. I use it at least a dozen times a day.
If I could only convince the author to go open source and port
it to Linux!
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TextPad
| I don't use TextPad
for text editing (I'm a vi die-hard), but it's inexpensive and
I've heard lots of good things about it from colleagues.
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| FREE GRAPHICS/MULTIMEDIA UTILITIES |
ImageMagick Suite
| Powerful command-line based image manipulation. C-callable API available. Also available for many unix platforms. |
IrfanView
| Irfan Skiljan's excellent image viewer |
LDView
| Terrific, free 3D model viewer written by Travis Cobbs
using OpenGL API. Views a file type called LDraw (.ldr) designed
primarily for viewing LEGO models, but certainly useful for
any generic 3D-viewing since it is a very simple ASCII file format.
Source code is available. You can also find more about LEGO drawing
utilities at www.ldraw.org. Also
see my
software archive containing my STLView utility
which converts STL files to LDraw files and displays them with LDView.
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FFMPEG
| FFMPEG (May 2009) is now the only tool I feel I need for
converting video or audio. The only drawback for some will be that it
is a command-line-based tool (which is actually a plus for me).
I had some issues with older versions of FFMPEG (time
cropping didn't always work), but those seem to have been resolved, and
it can now do whatever I would need (convert formats, crop, re-size,
change frame rates and bit rates, time slice, convert to/from still images,
extract audio from a video file, etc.).
The latest version of
ffmpeg.exe for Win32
is at videohelp.com
(or just google ffmpeg.exe win32).
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Bink
| Good video conversion tool with GUI
allows you to extract frames to stills
and vice-versa, crop, scale, and convert from/to any format you have a
codec for. Uses Win32 AVI calls and has command-line functionality.
This is the best tool I've found for converting animated GIFs to
more conventional video formats like AVI files, but it doesn't know
as many formats as FFMPEG.
Free. |
VLC;
MPlayer
| These are terrific
Windows Media Player and QuickTime alternatives. I find Windows Media Player surprisingly bad at deciphering
modern codecs, and I try to avoid Apple software because it is
nagware and spyware all rolled into one.
MPlayer
(as of May 2009) has matured immensely since I last tried it. It is
now a full-featured player which handles all modern video formats,
and it works in Linux and Windows.
VLC has been my default player since 2006,
and it plays the 720p HD videos from my DMC-ZS3
on my 2004 PC more smoothly than MPlayer, but I like
some of MPlayer's features better (e.g. pressing '.' to go frame by
frame--
strangely, MPlayer plays HD videos much better if I just hold down the
'.' key to go frame-by-frame through the video, but my graphics card
is from 2002, so I get what I get).
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Other Useful Pages
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| FREE MP3/CD RIPPING UTILITIES |
CDex (v1.51)
| Outstanding Win32 CD Ripper/encoding program w/GUI.
Has it all, and it's free (GPL'd). Highly recommended.
Also visit the CDex home page. |
WinLama
| Compact Win32 GUI front-end for LAME, a .wav to .mp3 encoder
(local copy) |
lame.exe (P3 opt)
| Win32 command line version of a popular .wav to .mp3 (and .mp3 to
.wav) conversion program, compiled with Intel version 5
compiler and optimized for P-III systems. Compile line: icl /G6 /O3 /Qipo. |
lame.exe (P4 opt)
| Compiled with Intel version 5
compiler and optimized for P4 systems. Compile line: icl /G7 /QaxW /Qipo
/O3. |
Official L.A.M.E. Home Page
| L.A.M.E. provides free source code for MP3 conversions. |
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