10 Free, Open Source Digital Entertainment Resources and Roundups
by Sam Dean - Mar. 11, 2009Comments (4)- Related Blog Posts
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Most users of proprietary software arm themselves with arrays of digital entertainment applications, ranging from iTunes to Windows Media Player to RealPlayer. That's due to big improvements in the bandwidth everyone gets, attention from content providers, and more. The good news is that for open sourcers, digital entertainment applications have matured -- big-time -- for Windows, Linux and the Mac. Even if you use proprietary applications such as iTunes for music, or Windows Media Player for videos, there are many open source applications that can complement and add to your libraries, collections and players. You'll find over 10 good roundups of open source digital entertainment resources here, and more than 50 total free applications.
Roll Your Own iPod OS, Synch Your Songs Anywhere. In our recent post "8 Free, Open Source Tools for a Better Digital Music Experience," we discussed free tools for synching iPod and iPhone libraries from any computer, the open source Rockbox operating system which can energize old iPods and MP3 players, getting Last.fm radio content on Android phones and other platforms, and more. If you're a Firefox user, also check this collection of 16 great music extensions for the browser.
Amarok vs Songbird. Here's a post that puts open source iTunes alternatives Amarok and Songbird to the test. Here we took a look at Songbird and summarized why you ought to consider this melody maker for your open source arsenal, and we also discussed Amarok here.
Video Tools Have Grown Up. It used to be that open source video tools were scarce and often fraught with problems--but no more. In this post, we recommend eight top-notch tools for video playback and encoding, ranging from the very flexible SMPlayer, which lets you add subtitles to your videos, to the super-easy Simple Theora Encoder.
Manage My Library. Open source media centers are maturing and improving by leaps and bounds.  The Plex media center for Mac OS X, MediaPortal for Windows, Boxee for Linux and the Mac, and MythTV for Linux are all good examples of powerful open source media center applications. Check your options here.
E-Books Aren't Only on the Kindle. Recently, e-book readers have become substantially more popular than they every were before. Amazon's new version of its Kindle reader is getting good reviews, and many people like the Sony Reader. You don't necessarily have to buy a piece of expensive hardware and pay for books to enjoy e-books, though. If you commute with a laptop, a netbook, or tote a portable phone with you, there are several free and open source resources for reading e-books. Here are several good ones to know about.
Young Walt Disney? If you like to create your own animated movies, characters and the like, take a look at this post. It introduces Blender (powerful 3D animation software that has been used to create full-length animated movies), XVid (a utility that can compress video files at a ratio of 100:1, which is useful for any video work you do), and more.
Dress Up Your Content With Graphics Glitz. Good graphics software can be an excellent complement to any work you do creating digital video content and the like. We've collected six cool, free open source tools here. Make sure to check out IrfanView (which is freeware, not open source, but really shines.) Â Also, check out our very popular post on how to get the most out of GIMP, one of the most robust open source graphics products. It includes a link to a great, free online book on GIMP.
Faster, Better Photo Management. If you enjoy working with digital photos, GPhotoSpace is a very interesting extension for Firefox that we wrote up here. It requires Firefox 3 and leverages the 7GB+ of storage space that you currently get with a Gmail account for an online photo storage repository. Uploads tend to be much faster than on sites such as Flickr, and there are other conveniences to having your photo management application in your e-mail engine.
Getting Torrent Content, on the Up-and-Up. Are you under the impression that BitTorrent downloads are illegal or DRM infected? There are plenty of sites out there that offer free and legal torrent downloads to save bandwidth and make file sharers happy. Here, you'll find sites such as Legit Torrents, where you can get free video, games and Linux distros, plus nine other legal torrent sites worth checking into.
Scan Your Videos in Advance. Here's a pictorial tour of one of the more useful Firefox extensions we've tried out in a while: VideoSurf. It provides easy-to-scan chronological timelines for online videos at YouTube, Google Video and other sites.Â
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