FREE
COMMAND LINE UTILITIES
...because real programmers use the command line!
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Info-Zip
UPX EXE Packer
| UPX v1.25w (local copy)
An excellent, easy-to-use, seamless, executable packer to tame
those bloated .EXE files. |
UUDeview
Secure Shell (ssh.org)
Wget home page
Unix-style command archive
| Here,
you'll find numerous Win32 ports of GNU/Unix utilities. I have a local,
more dated (Jan 2002) copy of many unix-style Win32 commands
here (w/src, includes grep, diff,
make, tar, touch, head, tail, compress, gzip, zoo, and which, plus
rsxnt.dll, which is needed to run some of the commands. I recommend
putting all of these files in a directory in your path.)
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| COMMERCIAL UTILITIES |
Easyplot
| I don't
usually like to recommend a commercial package, but this is an exception.
Easyplot is an excellent, intuitive plotting program geared towards
scientific plotting, data analysis, and curve fitting. It is what
Gnu-plot should have been, and
it is proof that good Win32 programs can still come in
small, efficient packages (total disk footprint < 1 MB).
Try it and you'll be hooked. I use it at least a dozen times a day.
If I could only convince the author to go open source and port
it to Linux!
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TextPad
| I don't use TextPad
for text editing (I'm a vi die-hard), but it's inexpensive and
I've heard lots of good things about it from colleagues.
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| FREE GRAPHICS/MULTIMEDIA UTILITIES |
ImageMagick Suite
| Powerful command-line based image manipulation. C-callable API available. Also available for many unix platforms. |
Irfan View
| Irfan Skiljan's excellent image viewer |
LDView
| Terrific, free 3D model viewer written by Travis Cobbs
using OpenGL API. Views a file type called LDraw (.ldr) designed
primarily for viewing LEGO models, but certainly useful for
any generic 3D-viewing since it is a very simple ASCII file format.
Source code is available. You can also find more about LEGO drawing
utilities at www.ldraw.org. Also
see my
software archive containing my STLView utility
which converts STL files to LDraw files and displays them with LDView.
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Bink
| Good video conversion tool allows you to extract frames to stills
and vice-versa, crop, scale, and convert from/to any format you have a
codec for. Uses Win32 AVI calls and has command-line functionality.
This is the best tool I've found for converting animated GIFs to
more conventional video formats like AVI files.
Free. |
JPEG Home Page
JPEG Library (IJG.org)
PNG Home Page
zlib Home Page
SDL Library Home Page
Free-Codecs.com
VideoHelp.com
MPlayer;
VLC;
Open QuickTime
| These are QuickTime alternatives. In general, I try to
avoid QuickTime since I find Apple's install/registration/update nagging
practices to be more distasteful than most spyware. I have tried MPlayer
and it works well for h.264 but didn't have any controls. VLC works
great. I've made it my default player. It's not quite as fancy
as Windows Media Player, but it
plays more formats--even h.264. It supposedly will save to different
formats as well, but I've never gotten that to work very well (I mostly
use FFMPEG and Bink to convert formats). Open QuickTime doesn't
appear to have a Win32 install yet but could be an excellent future
option.
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FFMPEG
| Excellent command-line audio/video decoder/encoder/converter.
The latest version of ffmpeg.exe for Win32 can be found by
searching videohelp.com.
The only glitch I have with FFMPEG is trying to convert a video starting
in the middle. The result typically has a strange frame rate or the audio
is completely out of sync with the video. I don't know if this is only
a problem with the win32 version or not.
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3ivx.com
| Not free, but inexpensive MP4 codecs for Windows.
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GIF to AVI
Gromada video conversion software
Windows Metafile Help Page
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| FREE MP3/CD RIPPING UTILITIES |
CDex (v1.51)
| Outstanding Win32 CD Ripper/encoding program w/GUI.
Has it all, and it's free (GPL'd). Highly recommended.
Also visit the CDex home page. |
WinLama
| Compact Win32 GUI front-end for LAME, a .wav to .mp3 encoder
(local copy) |
lame.exe (P3 opt)
| Win32 command line version of a popular .wav to .mp3 (and .mp3 to
.wav) conversion program, compiled with Intel version 5
compiler and optimized for P-III systems. Compile line: icl /G6 /O3 /Qipo. |
lame.exe (P4 opt)
| Compiled with Intel version 5
compiler and optimized for P4 systems. Compile line: icl /G7 /QaxW /Qipo
/O3. |
Official L.A.M.E. Home Page
| L.A.M.E. provides free source code for MP3 conversions. |
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