SoMud – More than Free Download Manager

If you are dealing with downloading digital content from the Web, you may find SoMud quite useful. While many people utilize its capabilities for the simple and straightforward torrent files downloads, there are much more the software may offer, as to the operations with multimedia files: audio, video, and graphics. The long list of the features is presented below.  

Search and Download

* Embedded P2P search engine support allows you to search and download anything from most popular P2P search engines
* Embedded web video search engine support allows you to search, preview and download web video on the Internet
* Simple click to download any file you find - zero need for any BitTorrent or P2P knowledge
* Easily download web images to your gallery
* Support searching via Sock5/HTTP proxy

BitTorrent Download and Share

* Preview capability - allows you to play media file while it is being downloaded
* Fast resume - resume task quickly without checking file integrity from the beginning
* Adjust download/upload bandwidth limit for all tasks or for individual task
* Support downloading only specified files within a Torrent
* Create your own Torrent for seeding - share your own files over P2P networks
* Schedule tasks or shutdown computer at specified time
* Look up for peer location
* Block particular peer or multiple IP ranges
* Support downloading via Magnet URI and Info-hash
* Web browser integration for Magnet protocol
* Support both HTTP and UDP trackers
* Support multiple trackers
* Support DHT protocol - trackerless Torrent
* Support router NAT and UPnP
* Support LSD (Local service discovery) - discover peers within the same local network
* Support task queue management
* Support super seeding - initial seeding
* Support private Torrent
* Support web seeding - HTTP seeding
* Support Sock5/HTTP proxy for connecting trackers, DHT networks and/or peers
* Support encrypting/decrypting data streams
* Support disk caching management
* Support user commenting and rating
* Support URL clipboard monitoring
* Support drag/drop

HTTP/FTP Download

* Intelligent multiple splitting support greatly boosts download speed
* Support downloading with multiple mirror URLs to boost download speed
* Preview capability allows you to play media file while it is being downloaded
* Support looking up for URL host location
* Support downloading via Sock5/HTTP proxy
* Support authentication, rename and file tag/description
* Failure retry mechanism
* Support URL clipboard monitoring
* Support user commenting and rating

Web Image Download

* Extract and download all web images from web pages to your gallery
* Support JPG/JPEG/GIF/PNG image formats
* Support downloading images with customized sizes
* Support zoom in/out preview
* Support web browser integration

Desktop Audio/Video and Camera Audio/Video Recording (Windows only)

* Record your desktop/screen motion and sound into video to present and to share
* Support recording either full screen or selected desktop/screen areas
* Support seamlessly inserting customized screen annotations while recording for better presentation
* Record any sound from your PC or microphone into MP3
* Capture camera video and audio
* Support customized recording and capturing parameters adjustment for professional use
* Support shortcut operations
* Currently, these features are only supported on Windows platforms

MP4/FLV (Flash) Web Video Playback

* Embedded MP4/FLV (Flash) video player allows you to play downloaded web videos
* Integrated into SoMud - download, preview and play operations are streamlined
* Support drag/drop

File Integrity Verification

* Verify file integrity based on its hash
* Generate hash for specified file
* Supported hash algorithms: MD4, MD5 and SHA-1
* Support drag/drop

Audio/Video Format Conversion

* Plugin support for converting any audio and video format
* Support for multiple files conversion
* Support for customized parameters adjustment
* Support drag/drop


Parental Control and Virus Scan

* Support parental control to filter specified keywords and lock specified content
* Support integrating third-party anti-virus software to scan downloaded files

AP Suggestor

* Support search engine keywords suggestion

* Support video and image suggestion

* Support similar sites and answers suggestion
* Support shopping comparison
* Support Facebook and Twitter suggestion

Cross-platform Support

SoMud currently supports operating systems for both Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X

For Windows:
Windows 7
Windows Vista
Windows Server 2003
Windows XP

For Mac OS X:
Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
CPU Architecture Support: Universal Binary

Website: http://www.somud.com/

OSForensics: Free Computer Investigation Tool

OSForensics is a new digital investigation tool which lets you extract forensic data or uncover hidden information from computers. OSForensics has a number of unique features which make the discovery of relevant forensic data even faster, such as high-performance deep file searching and indexing, e-mail and e-mail archive searching and the ability to analyze recent system activity and active memory. OSForensics can build and let you view an events timeline which shows you the context and time of activities. You can even recover data and files that have been deleted by users. OSForensics comes with a built-in file viewer which lets you examine a file contents, properties and meta-data, as well as an e-mail viewer which is compatible with most popular mail client formats.

Search within Files

If the basic file search functionality is not enough, OSForensics can also create an index of the files on a hard disk. This allows for lightning fast searches for text contained inside the documents. Powered by the technology behind Wrensoft's acclaimed Zoom Search Engine.

Search for Emails

An additional feature of being able to search within files is the ability to search email archives. The indexing process can open and read most popular email file formats (including pst) and identify the individual messages.

This allows for a fast text content search of any emails found on a system

Recover Deleted Files

After a file has been deleted, even once removed from the recycling bin, it often still exists until another new file takes its place on the hard drive. OSForensics can track down this ghost file data and attempt to restore it back to useable state on the hard drive.

Uncover Recent Activity

Find out what users have been up to. OSForensics can uncover the user actions performed recently on the system, including but not limited to:

* Opened Documents

* Web Browsing History

* Connected USB Devices

* Connected Network Shares

Collect System Information

Find out what's inside the computer. Detailed information about the hardware a system is running on:

* CPU type and number of CPUs

* Amount and type of RAM

* Installed Hard Drives

* Connected USB devices

* and much more.

View Active Memory

Look directly at what is currently in the systems main memory. Attempt to uncover passwords and other sensitive information that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Select from a list of active processes on the system to inspect. OSF can also dump their memory to a file on disk for later inspection.

Extract Logins and Passwords

Recover usernames and passwords from recently accessed websites in common web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Opera.

Price

* Feature restricted edition: Free
* Professional edition: US$499

Free Version Limitations

* Web browser screen capture: Image is watermarked                               

* List and Search for Alternate File Streams: N/A

* Sort Files by Color: N/A

* Multi-core acceleration for file decryption: N/A

* Customizable System Information Gathering: N/A

* Import / Export Hash Sets: N/A

* Manage Cases: Limited to 3 cases at a time

* Disk indexing and searching: Limited to 200,000 files or EMails

* Restore Deleted Files: Limited to one file at a time.

Screenshots

                                                                                   

Review: FCPortables

Developers’ website: http://www.osforensics.com/osforensics.html

Download: http://www.osforensics.com/downloads/osf.exe

Handbrake – Free DVD Ripper and Video Converter

The Handbrake is a program that converts videos in various formats, with the advantage of being a free open source tool. The program is compatible with devices such as Apple TV, iPod, iPhone, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PSP.

This software brings two new major features: compatibility with Blu-ray discs and the ability to edit the settings of a conversion directly from the files that are already in line to be processed. The interface is relatively simple and the menus are straightforward.

In one of the previous publications we provided step-to-step guidance on how to convert DVD to MPEG-4 format: http://freeware4review.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-to-convert-dvd-to-ipod-format.html. You can take a look.

But, this post will cover general capabilities of the utility, which can offer much higher functionality than this particular conversion.

Input:

Handbrake can process most common multimedia files and any DVD or Blu-ray sources that do not contain any kind of copy protection.

Outputs:

* File Containers: MP4 (M4V) and MKV

* Video Encoders: H.264(x264), MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 (libav), or Theora (libtheora)

* Audio Encoders: AAC, CoreAudio AAC/HE-AAC (OS X Only), MP3, Flac, AC3, or Vorbis.

* Audio Pass-through: AC-3, DTS, DTS-HD, AAC and MP3 tracks

Main features:

* Title / Chapter selection

* Queue up multiple encodes

* Chapter Markers

* Subtitles (VobSub, Closed Captions CEA-608, SSA, SRT)

* Constant Quality or Average Bitrate Video Encoding

* Support for VFR, CFR and VFR

* Video Filters: Deinterlacing, Decomb, Detelecine, Deblock, Grayscale, Cropping and scaling

* Live Video Preview

* Built-in presets for common devices

Supported platforms:

* Windows 32-bit and 64-bit

* Mac

* Ubuntu

Website: http://handbrake.fr/

Direct Downloads: http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php