SPlayer is a free, open source media player that is lightweight, well designed, and quite powerful. It promises to play every conceivable media format (including DVD’s and streaming media), and to optimize your audio and video quality to best utilize your hardware specifications. It is light on power consumption, making it ideal for laptop/travel use, is truly portable, and offers a handful of innovative features such as on-demand automatic downloads of subtitles.

Media Cope is a free program that supports a wide range of video and audio formats and combines a media player, audio and video converters and cutters, batch photo resizing and conversions, as well as a handful of other functions in a single tabbed interface.

This strangely named program is primarily a media player, but it also includes many other functions that typically are not bundled together, such as media conversions and cutting. There’s something really nice about having multiple functions in the same place within a unified interface; take a look at the screenshot above and notice the tabs and top, and you will immediately ’get’ the concept behind this program.

PhotoFilmStrip is a free program that can create video from images quickly and easily, including the Ken Burns style zoom-in/zoom-out effect commonly used in documentaries. Other features include the ability to add subtitles, add a soundtrack, and use black and white/sepia versions of your images. PhotoFilmStrip is multiplatform (Windows/Linux).

Explore&Burn is a free app that allows you to burn to files to CD/DVD right from the Windows explorer context menu. It can burn disk image files (ISO, IMG) as well as any file type to a wide range of disc types (including Dual Layer DVD’s). Supports single-session and multi-session discs with ISO-9660, Joliet and UDF file systems.

Totally Free Burner is a CD/DVD burner with a nice, minimalistic interface and an excellent range of features.

The KM Player is a free media player that supports a comprehensive range of media format, including broad DVD support using all internal filters and codecs. It is extremely feature-rich, offering a range of features such as applying filters during playback (sharpening, denoise, color effects, etc), excellent subtitles support, playing (and capturing) streaming media over the internet, playing incomplete files, bookmarking parts of videos, and others.

BitRipper is an integrated DVD ripping and conversion program that provides AVI or Mpeg creation from DVDs in a single step.

Amok DVD Shrinker is a free program that can compress decrypted DVDs to smaller, user-defined disk sizes without any noticeable reduction in quality. It is designed to enable the copying of commercial DVDs stored on nonstandard media in order to fit them on a standard 4.7 gig writable DVD.

BurnAware Free Edition is a free CD/DVD burning software with a small footrprint that can write to a wide range of CD/DVD media types including Blu-Ray; write Audio CDs and DVD-Video files. Aside from writing/verifying data CDs it can also create audio CDs from music files and burn data and video DVDs as well as burn ISO disk images. BurnAware free edition s

DVD Slideshow GUI is a powerful freeware program that can create slideshows consisting of images as well as videos, add subtitles, set to music then export them to .ISO format or DVD folder ready to be burned onto a DVD or any of a number of video file formats. Allows for adding borders, subtitles, and animating images, and provides a full editing environment where every element is customizable and a wide range of pre-defined filters and transition effects are available.