Raymond.CC Blog

Most of the popular video players such as VLC Media Player and KM Player already support playing subtitles together with the video. However there is a restriction that the subtitle will only be displayed when the video is played. You cannot use it to play just the subtitle itself. The ability to play only subtitle can be pretty important for deaf or hearing impaired people. An example is Netflix still doesn’t offer closed captioning or subtitles for streaming movies and TV episodes even after announcing on mid 2009 which may take them a year to implement it. Last year The National Association of the Deaf has sued Netflix for failing to provide closed-captioning on most of its streaming content.

Other than just crossing your fingers and waiting for Netflix to provide closed-captioning and subtitles, you can actually use a subtitle player to just play the subtitles which can be easily downloaded for free. There are a few free subtitle players which you can find and download from Softpedia and to make things easier for you, I have tested all of them and found that Greenfish Subtitle Player is the best.

Back when I was using Windows 98 and XP, codec pack is the first thing that I will install after completing the driver installation. These codecs are required to play downloaded videos and sometimes even audio files or else you might end up hearing the sound but no video and vice versa. The only codec pack that I used before is K-Lite Codec Pack and I never had any playback problems with it. As for now, I have not installed any codec packs ever since I started using media players such as VLC media player and KM Player that has built-in codecs. Moreover most of time I watch downloaded videos in my WD TV Live player and not on my computer so there is no reason that I need to install any codec packs on my computer.

What I’ve learned last time was codec packs are very sensitive. After installing it and if it works perfectly, just leave it as it is and there is no need to update the codec pack. Reinstalling codec packs because of some playback problems may not even be advisable. You should probably try to use a tool called Codec Tweak Tool to scan the registry to detect and remove broken references to codecs and filters first.

We have already covered RegFromApp where you can use it to track real time registry changes by injecting it into the process that you want to trace. Other than tracking what registry changes are being made to a computer, it is also equally important to track the changes on folders. Here is a simple tool called Track Folder Changes which you can use to track real time changes on folders that you specify. By default, Track Folder Changes tracks the whole C:\ drive where normally the operating system is installed. You can easily change the folder that you want to monitor by clicking the browse button. Upon running Track Folder Changes, it instantly displays in real time a tree with the list of created/deleted/changed files in a specific directory and its subdirectories. The coloring on the files helps to easily determine if a file is deleted, modified or created.

I have heard about RegFromApp tool for quite some time but never really tested it because I am a very happy SysTracer user. SysTracer is able to take snapshots and then perform comparison to show the differences on the files, registries and applications. As for RegFromApp, the name itself sounds like it only monitors the registry which I think is not complete since I also need to monitor for file changes. Nevertheless, I am always a big fan of tools created by Nir Sofer so here is my review on RegFromApp.

After testing RegFromApp, the methodology is actually quite different from SysTracer because RegFromApp attempts to inject to a process and then monitors the registry changes in real time. Unlike SysTracer where I had to take the first snapshot, make the changes and then taking another snapshot to compare the differences.

Rogueware or commonly known as fake antivirus is a kind of scareware that misleads users into paying for fake or simulated removal of malware or that installs other malware. Once your computer is infected with a rogueware, it will either secretly download more real viruses to your computer which is kinda rare nowadays or it simply simulates that your computer is infected and offers you to clean it by buying the software. Although the simulated ones don’t seem to be really a threat to your computer because it doesn’t drop more malwares to your computer but it cripples your computer and nags the crap out of you until you give up and just pay them the money. Some rogueware is even programmed to defeat or disable antivirus or antispyware programs.

I have previously written about a free tool called Remove Fake Antivirus that is able to detect some rogue antivirus and clean them from your computer. Here is another similar tool called RogueKiller by Tigzy which in my opinion is more powerful in detecting and disabling Rogueware.

Some hotels only provides an Internet connection via wired LAN and only some parts of it has wifi connection. If you urgently need a wifi in your room for your smartphone to get online, one solution is to make use of a laptop that is running on Windows 7 and turn it into an access point or wifi hotspot so that your smartphone can connect to your laptop and get the Internet connection from there. It may sound difficult but in fact it is very easy as all you need to do is visit a website, fill up the form, click a button and perform a simple Internet Connection Sharing configuration. Other than that, the computer must have Java installed. If you haven’t noticed, I did not say anything about download or installing any third party software to do this.

Most computers today already comes with a disc burner but there are still some notebook users who owns subnotebooks, netbooks and ultraportable laptops that have no optical drive onboard. It could be troublesome if you need to backup files to a CD or DVD because you will first need to copy the files to a shared folder on another computer, and burn it from there. To make things easier, Paragon Net Burner is a great solution that uses iSCSI technology to share the disc burner to allow the client to work as if a physical optical drive is connected to it.

Although I currently haven no use for Net Burner, I still think that this is an interesting software that is able to help user save money without purchasing additional optical drives when they already have one on one of their computer. Paragon Net Burner is free and the installer is less than 3MB in size.