With apologies to Trogdor: Shortly after I posted my review of Toast, I stumbled across a comparison review of a few of the top Mac burning software packages. Toast makes an appearance, as do Burn and two others, as well as a 5th one that was suggested in the reviews’ comments (LiquidCD) which got me to thinking about other media-related downloads worth your time.
First up, Windows users looking to convert their media over to handheld-appropriate formats ought to look into Videora which handles the conversion tasks for the Microsoft-addled. Next up is Democracy, an incredible video aggregator with support for RSS “channels” and BitTorrent downloads. It’s available for Mac, Linux and Windows, so platform concerns should be nil. Mac users looking to correctly tag their iPod-ready videos so that they show up correctly in iTunes should look into Lostify, your one-stop-shop for all your video tagging needs.
Last of all, those of you looking to get caught up on TV shows you missed should check out ShareTV, a site that looks to centralize torrents for a lot of the top-flight shows currently on TV in one easily-accessible website. Be sure to give it a look.
Burnination, The Follow-Up
I’ve been using the great VLC for a couple of years now. VLC is the video engine that powers Democracy player. While I’m sure that some folks appreciate the integrated applications that Democracy provides, I can’t do without the lightweight, no-skins attached combination of VLC and uTorrent.
I’m not sure what the goals of ShareTV are, but TVTorrents.com has been serving my needs for a while. They carry both current and canceled shows, so you can catch up on episodes of Firefly that everyone has always been yapping about (though you should probably own the DVD anyway). A “favorites” feature attached to a login allows you access to an RSS feed for what shows you watch regularly, which is a great feature when you’re using uTorrent, since it can suck the torrents right out of the feed.
Perhaps the best part of TVTorrents is that the shows all have maintainers that screen the source files for quality. There are plenty of tracker sites that will give you access to TV shows, but having the highest quality pick of both the standard and HD versions of an episode in a format that I know I won’t have to futz with is very appreciated.
You wouldn’t happen to have any invites for TVTorrents, wouldja?