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.

Scenegrabber .NET is a free program that can capture screenshots from videos and create a preview thumbnail sheet for each video and save it as an image. The program can create these “sceneshots” for multiple videos in batch based on your desired settings. Scenegrabber can view/play any video that is playable on your machine using installed system codecs.

If you ever need to make a quick video capture of your screen but don’t want the hassle of having to install any software or upload the video anywhere to share it, Screenr might be a god-send. Screenr allows you to capture screencasts and share them easily, being especially designed for Twitter integration.
[Editor's note: this post was written by Freewaregenius contributor Jason H. Check out his tech blog: 404TechSupport.com].

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).

AuthorStream Desktop is a free PowerPoint Add-on that makes it easy to search for and insert YouTube videos as well as images from the web into your PowerPoint files. Users on other computers that you might share your PowerPoint files with will need an internet connection to view the embedded videos, but will NOT require AuthorStream Desktop installed on their computers in order to do so.

Tubemaster Plus Plus (the sequel to previously mentioned Tubmaster Plus) can download media (video/audio) from video sharing sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, MySpace, Dailymotion and others, as well as encrypted media from “ani-leeching” websites sites such as Imeen, Pandora and Last.fm. TM++ can also perform on-the-fly format conversions as well as general Video and MP3 searches.

Double Vision is a freeware program designed for viewing web video (such as YouTube, Netflix, and Fancast) while you work, by providing a semi-transparent player that shows through all other windows and programs that are visible on your desktop.

Hulu desktop is a free desktop client for Windows and Mac that connects to the Hulu service and plays Hulu videos and programs within a sleek, feature-rich interface, without the need for an internet browser. It features a spectacular look-and-feel, high-definition video, and offers the ability to resume partially watched shows. It also supports standard Windows Media Center or Apple IR remote controls.

BB Flashback Express is a free screen recording program that can capture your PC’s screen, sound, and webcam video and supports capturing graphics/animations, including 3D graphics. It offers a high degree of control over your video (output resolution, quality, file size, recording modes, mouse autoscroll, and cursor highlighting effects). Saves resulting files as either FLV’s, AVI’s or SWF’s, and offers the ability to easily upload videos to YouTube or embed them inside a webpage.

Taksi is a free video/screen recording tool that can capture 3D graphics applications such as games. It will record any Windows application that uses DirectX 8, DirectX 9, OpenGL or GDI and create an AVI file using any type of codecs that are installed on your system (or capture frames to PNG/BMP). Audio capture is not yet implemented.

TubeMaster Plus is a free tool that can download streaming video and audio files from almost any media sharing site, including sites with anti-leeching protection. TubeMaster Plus also can convert downloaded videos to several formats, offers a video search function across multiple video sources, and offers a downloadble audio mp3 search function.