Category Archives: Free Software

Irfanview Tutorial – How to create a PDF

Here’s a new video that describes making a PDF (Portable Document Format) with Irfanview. Have we ever mentioned that we love Irfanview? Well, we do. It’s free and does a million things with no muss, fuss or flashy ads. Here’s the video:

 

Thanks for reading and watching! Comments, questions and suggestions are welcomed. Fill in the form below or, better yet, ‘Like’ us on Facebook. Here is the link:Computers Made Simple on Facebook.

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DVD Ripping with DVDShrink

In our last post we showed you how to author a DVD using DVDFlick. Here is the link for that: DVD Authoring with DVDFlick. Today we’re going rip a DVD. Essentially, ripping is copying. Using this system you can make a backup copy of just about any DVD that you own. We specify ‘own’ here since copying a disc that you don’t own is theft, at least according to most governments. Let’s get going.

1. Download and install DVDShrink. Get it here: dvdshrink.org  Do NOT download DVDShrink from any other site. The software is free and always has been free. Don’t ever pay for it.

2. Load the DVD that you want to copy. Basically that means to put it in the DVD burner in your computer. Don’t play it. If your DVD player starts up, close it down.

3. Open DVDShrink. This is what you will see:

Photo of DVDShrink Menus   1
DVDShrink has a very clean, simple layout.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. With the DVD movie in your DVD burner, click the Open Disk button. DVDShrink will automatically find your DVD burner and it will already know the movie’s title. Here’s what you’ll see next:

Photo of DVDShrink Menus   2
Most DVD drives are D;/ but yours may be different. Regardless, click OK if this is the movie you want to copy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. DVDShrink then analyzes the movie. You can see a preview while it works or turn the preview off, no matter.

Photo of DVDShrink Menus   3
This process takes a few minutes so grab a coffee or check your email.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Once DVDShrink has finished its analysis, you have some decisions to make.

Photo of DVDShrink Menus   4
Here is your movie, broken up into bits and pieces.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Usually there are other languages in the right panel, Spanish and French, for example. Un-check the languages that you don’t want on your new DVD. Each time you un-select a language, the more room for picture you have on the disk. Here’s the explanation for that:

TIP: DVDs, the non-BluRay ones that you buy in the store, are normally around ten gigabytes in size. They are burned onto DVD stock that has dual-layers which simply means that they hold more stuff. The normal blank DVDs that you buy usually only allow 4.7 gigabytes of storage. Here’s where the word shrink comes in. DVDShrink takes the full movie on the original DVD and shrinks it down to a size that fits your blank 4.7 gigabyte DVD. See the green line at the top of the photo above? That means that the full movie can fit on a normal DVD blank. Farther down, look for the box with 51.2 % in it. DVDShrink has made the movie about half the size it was before. Any time you uncheck something, there is less material to put on the disk so the video quality can be improved.

What does this mean to you? Simply that the video on your copy will not be a crisp and clear as it is on the original. Most people won’t notice the difference. All we are saying is don’t expect a perfect duplicate. (You can get dual-layer blanks but they are very expensive. 4.7 gigabyte blanks are priced at 100 for less than $20.00 here in Toronto. Use Verbatim brand only, preferably ones made in Japan. Don’t buy no-name disks, whatever you do.)

5. You can choose to not burn the Extras or extra languages which makes the video quality better. Don’t worry too much about this since the extra quality is minimal at best. Once you are ready, click the Backup! icon at the top. The backing up process takes a while, depending on the speed of your computer. DVDShrink will store the files it creates on your C:/ drive using the name of the movie to identify them.

6. When the software has finished, you can burn the files to a DVD and play them on any DVD player you own or on any computer. If you have Nero Burning Rom installed on your computer, DVDShrink will burn the DVD to a blank disk for you. You have to take the movie DVD out then insert a blank DVD, obviously. If you don’t have Nero on your computer, we will show you how to burn this DVD using Burnaware. That’s for next time. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading! Questions or comments are welcome. You can also ask questions on our Facebook page. Here is the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook 

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Here’s a link that might help us if you are interested in hosting your own blog with Fatcow Hosting. We’ve signed up to become an affiliate and we make a bit of money if you sign up for hosting via this link: FatCow Hosting Thanks!

 

 

DVD Authoring with DVD Flick

Instead of watching a video file on your computer, you might want to see it on the big TV screen in your living room or family room. While you could hook up your computer to your HDTV, it’s sometimes easier to simply pop a disk into your DVD player. How do you get a video file from your computer onto a DVD disk that you can watch on any tabletop DVD player? Here’s how we do it:

NOTE: You need a DVD burner for this project. Virtually every computer, whether it’s a laptop or a desktop, comes with a burner. If not, you can pick up an external USB burner for under $40.00.

1. Download and install DVD Flick. It’s free, don’t worry.

Photo of DVD Flick Authoring     1
Free and fast, DVD Flick is open source. An excellent product.

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. When DVD Flick is ready to go, find the video file that you want to make into a DVD and open it, either drag it into the DVD Flick interface or use the Add button on the GUI. DVD Flick will work with just about any video file, even home movies that you shoot with your camcorder or digicam.

Photo of DVD Flick Authoring     2
Click Add title and find the video file on your computer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. DVD authoring means that you’re taking a plain video file that you watch on your computer using VLC Media Player or Windows Media Player, etc., then adding a clickable menu that looks almost the same as a DVD that you buy in a store and burning it to a writable DVD disk. This final product can be played in any tabletop DVD player as well as in any DVD player in any computer, Mac/Linux or Windows. That means that you have to tell DVD Flick which menu style you want to use. Click Menu Settings to see the choices and make your decision:

DVD Flick Authoring     3
We like the Simple Black option.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. You have to set some parameters for DVD Flick. Click on Project Settings to see this:

Photo of DVD Flick Authoring     4
Click on the Burning tab and choose ‘Burn project to disk’, type the name you want to see on the menu, but leave Speed at 4. You’ll get a better disk that way. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. If you’re going to burn a few copies of the same disk, name your project and save it. That way you can burn the same video at some later date without having to do everything again.

6. Once you’ve got everything set, you have to tell DVD Flick where to save the temporary files it creates in order to make your DVD. Basically, it takes your video file and converts it into a package, according to the parameters you’ve just set, then burns the whole thing to a blank, writable DVD disk. Once you make sure the DVD works, you can go back and delete the files but, for now, look down on the bottom left of the GUI. DVD Flick saves the first DVD you make in a folder named ‘dvd’, usually in your Documents folder. You can either name each folder with the name of the video or add a number at the end of ‘dvd’ as we have here:

Photo of DVD Flick Authoring     6
We’ve burned six separate DVDs, as you can see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s pretty much all you have to do. When you’re ready, click ‘Create DVD’ up at the top, after making sure you have a blank DVD disk in the burner.

NOTE: We have wondered how many videos we can put on one DVD. The answer doesn’t seem to be out there but we’ve figured out that if you use a time limit of about an hour and a half, you’ll be fine. If the video you are burning isn’t great quality to begin with, it is possible to get a couple of full-length movies on one DVD. If you’re burning home movies, you can create separate menu titles for each one.

Lastly, this process is NOT for ripping a DVD that you have purchased. DVD ripping (copying) is not the same as authoring. We use DVD Shrink for ripping. It’s free and we may write about it at some point later on.

Thanks for reading! Questions or comments are welcome. You can also ask questions on our Facebook page. Here is the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook 

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Here’s a link that might help us if you are interested in hosting your own blog with Fatcow Hosting. We’ve signed up to become an affiliate and we make a bit of money if you sign up for hosting via this link: FatCow Hosting Thanks!

Spotify in Canada – revisited

We did a post on how to get Spotify in Canada quite a while ago. It seems that our solution worked for some people but not others. Here’s an update about a system that seems to work for us.

1. There are two versions of Spotify, three if you count the premium version of it. You can download the Spotify app and use it or, better yet, access the Spotify web player. Here’s the link: Spotify Web Player

Photo of Spotify Web Player
There’s lots of great streaming music on Spotify…if you can access it.

2. As with most apps and websites now, Spotify wants you to expand your experience by signing in with Facebook. If you live in Canada, don’t do that…not yet anyway.

3. We suggested using a VPN in our last post about this topic. It seemed that this is why it worked for us but we couldn’t see why it didn’t work for others. On the computer which accesses Spotify, we have several operating systems. The Windows 7 OS uses the VPN, mainly to access the U.S. version of Netflix.  We have changed the DNS settings of Windows 7 to force it to use the unblock-us.com VPN.

4. The other OS on this computer is Windows 8.1. We haven’t set up the VPN on it yet but we can still access the Spotify web player on it and have been able to do so for months. We were stumped as to why this is possible since we weren’t using unblock-us.com on it.

5. Right now, we think it’s the Facebook linking that lets us use Spotify here in Canada. Why is that? Quite simply because Facebook doesn’t know where the heck we are! That sounds funny but it’s true. A few months ago we decided to pull a fast on one Facebook and removed any mention of our actual location. Since then, Facebook has been telling us that our profile is incomplete. Oh the horror! Well, it will stay incomplete too.

6. Since Facebook doesn’t know where we are, Spotify doesn’t either. It seems that this is the case anyway. Here’s what the linked Facebook info update looks like:

Photo of Facebook Info Update
There is no reason to tell Facebook where you are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you’re in Canada or any other that can’t stream Spotify, give this a shot. Don’t tell Facebook where you are and, likely, Spotify won’t know either. Hopefully it will work for you just as it did for us. Good luck!

Thanks for reading!

Here’s the link to our Facebook page: Computers Made Simple on Facebook  Keep up to date on our posts and occasional tips and tricks.

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Here’s a link that might help us if you are interested in hosting your own blog with Fatcow Hosting. We’ve signed up to become an affiliate and we make a bit of money if you sign up for hosting via this link: FatCow Hosting Thanks!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WeChat vs. WhatsApp

We’ve been shouting about WeChat for quite a while. In fact, one of our posts on it is the most popular piece we’ve ever done. WhatsApp has been around a bit longer and claims more users than WeChat but the figures don’t include the hundreds of millions of users  in China. We think that in a worldwide comparison, WeChat would have more users. As more people leave Facebook, it seems they are turning to other social networking apps to keep in touch with friends and to meet new people. Today we’ll take a look at these two, relatively new instant messaging tools.

Photo of WeChat Instant Messaging
WeChat is still our favorite IM app.

Who’s Got Your Number?

Only WhatsApp asks for your mobile number so we’ll start with a warning. Do you really want instant messages from anyone on your phone’s contact list? We don’t. That condition alone would keep most people from choosing WhatsApp over WeChat. The only time WeChat gets your number is when you give it to them in order to link your mobile contacts with it. It is not a mandatory part of the signup process. Ten points for WeChat.

Which App Helps You Find New Friends? 

Only WeChat lets you search for new friends and it does it in a very unique and fun way. Shake your device and you instantly find others users who are doing the same thing. Why is this important? None of the other instant messaging apps allow for this kind of reaching out to users who are searching for friends. WhatsApp relies on your current contacts, blindly assuming that those contacts are the only people you are interested in messaging. Clearly, judging from the huge success that WeChat has found with its Shake and People Nearby features, this isn’t the case. The beauty of WeChat’s Shake is that both parties are shaking at the same time, essentially telling each other that they are open to new contacts. There is no misinterpretation and no privacy issues with Shake. You only use it when you have time and the inclination to search the world for potential contacts.

Free? We Love Free!

WeChat wins here because it is free, totally free. WhatsApp is only free for the first year, after which it costs a whopping $0.99. OK, so ninety-nine cents isn’t anywhere near whopping but you get the point. We’re not sure how WeChat makes any income from their app but the fact that it is still free after several years of being available, they must be getting income from somewhere. There is word of Tencent selling accounts to retail and commercial clients, so far we’ve only seen that as an opt-in choice. This means that you can choose to follow a retail chain, let’s say American Apparel, and get their directed messages but that’s it. Nothing that you didn’t already ask for comes your way. More points for WeChat.

Photo of WhatsApp Instant Messaging
WhatsApp is popular only because people don’t know about WeChat, right?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Privacy. Who’s On and When Did You Last Show Up? 

With WeChat, no one knows if you are online or sleeping or in the middle of a meeting. Your contacts can send messages and you might, or might not, respond immediately. With WhatsApp, users are shown as offline, online or ‘last seen at’. Add this to the problem we mentioned before, that of receiving instant messages from anyone on your contact list who uses WhatsApp, and we think WeChat wins again. WeChat asks you first if it’s OK to receive a message from a stranger.

We think you get the idea by now. WeChat is a free, full-featured instant messaging app that protects your privacy but let’s you have fun, too. As far as features go, WeChat wins hands down. You can send any kind of message you can think of: video, text, voice, photos, links to web pages…instantly. WhatsApp has recently added Group Chat and some other features but WeChat has had these for a lot longer. Which apps do you use? Let us know what you think is best and why. Make a comment below or, better yet,  Like us on our Facebook page and comment there. Here is the link:  Computers Made Simple on Facebook  We’ll be glad you did.

Thanks for reading!

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Here’s a link that might help us if you are interested in hosting your own blog with Fatcow Hosting. We’ve signed up to become an affiliate and we make a bit of money if you sign up for hosting via this link: FatCow Hosting Thanks!