The best of media players?

Have you ever tried watching a movie or show you got from a friend or downloaded off the internet, only to have it give an error or say you were missing something to play it?

Most of us who have ran into this problem just click the message and go to download whatever it is we need to playback the video, not caring the reason for the message. Others give up when the proper file isn't found or ask a friend for advice. Wouldn't it be great to just have a media player that does it all? It never requires you to download extra plug-ins or add-ons. It plays back anything that you throw at it.
Well I ran into a media player a couple years back that I've stuck with up until this day. I was having such a hard time finding something better than Windows Media Player to playback my files. It's all I had known until I searched for an alternative. I switched to a program called BS Player that a friend referred me to that worked for a while, but started having adware in later updates. Plus it was still not able to play all my video files.
I did a bit of research and found that a program called VLC Player would allow you to playback broken video files or a wide variety of file formats in general. I downloaded it and realized that it was larger than other media players by about 5-6 megabytes, and yet when I opened it the interface was very basic. That threw me off for about two minutes as I was able to open every single format I had with it: AVI, MPEG1 and 2, OGG, DVD's, VCD's, ASF, VOB, etc. Oh, did I mention that it's free?

Like I said before, you might not like the simple interface but it has the options all there. It's skinnable, can stream, transcode, accepts subtitles, and can also be used as your default audio player as well.

The only gripe I have with it is the playlist. Now I have a ton of shows, I think more than the average user would ever have. My 'bedtime' playlist consist of about 4 shows with a total of about 600 episodes. Well it seems that VLC doesn't like opening up that many files at once, especially from an external drive. I might be one of the only ones with this problem, but I've heard from others about their frustration with the playlist. This excerpt is taken from the Wikipedia page on VLC.
"Despite rewrites, the VLC playlist is still far from industry standards. It can not open its native playlist format and retain the saved playlist ordering, regularly placing a number of tracks that should be at the start of the playlist at the end. It also lacks the ability to manage tracks as a group, requiring users to move individual tracks to reorder the playlist. Lastly, some users have reported that when reordering tracks, the playlist can collapse back to the playlist title, requiring expansion before reordering can continue." So there's the con for this player.
VLC is by no means the only free media player out there. It might not even be your favorite, but it's mine and I recommend it for anyone who has had troubles playing videos back. The following is links to other various media players that are totally free. They should not contain any mal-ware, although I cannot guarantee they will stay free forever.

Note: This is a list of free players, ones that don't have a option to purchase a better version. These are windows based, but might support other operating systems.

AL Show - Have never used it
GOM Player - Decent player
iTunes - Everyone uses it, not bad
Kantaris - Never used it
FLV player Used it, it's okay. It's for .flv videos files
LCPlayer - Never heard of it
MediaFrame - Java based player, never heard of it
Media Player Classic My second favorite, plays everything!
Nemesis - Never tried it
NicePlayer - Uses quicktime, never tried it.
Simple Center - Free basic version, have not used this one
The Core Pocket Media Player - for Palm OS
The KMPlayer - Never used it
TrayPlayer - Taskbar player, never used it
ViPlay - Supports an ass load of subtitle formats, only for 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP
Windows Media Player - standard player, not that great

Let me know if I missed any...

How to properly waste time

If you are like me, then you spend the majority of your life in front of a computer. Most of this time is spent doing work, learning, and reading. I'd like to spend my break or free time doing something leisurely like playing a game. Well most work places won't allow you to download and install games, and solitaire can get pretty boring after the millionth time you play it. There is an alternative though... flash games! Yes, these browser based games are becoming very complex and creative nowadays. You can find thousands of sites that host flash games, but I know of only one that does it the best. Kongregate.com
Kongregate has been around for only a couple years, but they have grown enormously. They have taken flash gaming to an all new level. Not only do you have over 3000 games to choose from but they are all scored based on player reviews. A star scale from 1-5 lets you know what others think as well as a comment system. There is also an achievement like system that I think is derived from Xbox360's own achievement system.

Certain flash games, usually the popular ones, are given badges to earn. A badge has four difficulty levels: easy, medium, hard, and impossible. Points are given for each badge earned, easy being 5, and impossible being a whopping 60. Each game you rate also gives you a point to add. As your points increase, you gain levels. So far this leveling system only shows how much time you've wasted or how competitive you are. As an added bonus usually each Thursday a challenge is posted. The challenges are like mini badges, but you receive a special Card for Kongregates own card game called Kongai. Kongai is part of a premium games pack created by Kongregate. These games usually have a lot more content and effort put into them, which separates them from everyday flash games usually created by one or two people.

It even has a chat room system that is unheard of for flash gaming sites. You can join a chat room at random, or switch between tons of rooms to find one you particularly like. Sometimes the chat rooms can get out of control, but there's always a mod nearby to get things back in order. I will commend them on this too. I've never seen a site that cared so much for their users than Kongregate.
With such a massive amount of games, you come across a broad assortment of game styles from simple Tetris and Snake clones, to complex TD (tower defense) games, and story driven RPG's. There are even a couple multi-player games if you want direct competition. You can favorite the games you like, or search by tags given to games. If you wish to not sign up for an account, you'll be limited to only playing the games. Points, badges, and challenges are not available for guest.

You can find my profile under Professor Chaos, and yea... I spend a lot of time there.

Cleaning Your PC

You probably use your laptop or desktop every single day. Have you noticed any slow down or poor performance? How often do you clean out old programs? How often do you clean up your registry?

You might not even care about the cleanliness of your pc, but just by clearing up some temp files and cleaning your registry, you can drastically increase the overall performance of your computer. Lucky for you there is an awesome program that covers just this problem, and the best part is it's free. CCleaner or what it use to go by Crap Cleaner, is a utility which will optimize windows performance based on routine maintenance. It has 4 areas of clean up to choose from. The first is the Cleaner, which selects windows files and application files such as temporary internet files, cookies, recycle bin, and so on. If you click the Analyze button it will search through and give a list of items to be removed along with a size. If it's your first time, I've seen upwards of 1-2 gigs of crap that was just taking up space. Hit Run Cleaner to delete the files and see how it magically increases your pc's performance.

The next tool in it's arsenal is the Registry Cleaner. This will search your windows registry for any unused file extensions, any left over files from removed programs, missing .dll files, and tons more. ALWAYS and I mean ALWAYS backup your registry before you clean it. When you hit clean CCleaner will always ask you to backup changes made to registry, just in case something happened to windows or it removed a needed component by accident. It saves it as dates, so you can keep track of when the problem occurred and restore your registry prior to that.

The last clean up is under the Tools area. This has two parts and both are pretty important. The first being the Uninstall section. This will list every program that is installed currently on your PC. You might want to remove programs that you no longer use and take up space on your hard drive. Bundled software that came with your PC might not even show up in your programs list. Select the program you want removed and hit the Uninstaller button. It will run either the programs own uninstall or windows add/remove program. Then the final utility is called Startup, which controls the programs that start when you load up windows. This is important because the amount of programs that start up when Windows does actually slows down the start up process. This is also handy if you a program gives errors when Windows start, you can disable the program that gives the error. Don't just guess the programs to be disabled, look for any obvious ones like google or adobe, you can say don't run at startup and still have those programs. They'll just be ran when needed, not upon startup.

So that's it for now, here's the link for the CCleaner. I'd run this maybe once a week, the first time always takes the longest, it shouldn't be as bad the second or third time you run it.