Software…

Every now and then, far too rarely, I come across a software that is so good that I cannot help but rave about to whoever would lend me their ears.

In the past, it was Rocketdock and Windowblinds among others. Just this past week, I encountered another old friend of a software that I had almost forgotten about and discounted for being just another software in its field with no special and extraordinary features.

The software is ‘BSPlayer’. ‘BSPlayer’ is a video player. The reason I am such a big fan of this software now is that it solved a huge problem for me which incidently one of the best software in video player category created.

Being a sucker for installing the latest updates the moment they are available, I installed ‘GOM player’ and ‘VideoLan player’, everything went as expected and I got no errors upon the install. It was only when I tried to load a Xvid video, I encountered a problem. I could hear audio but there was no video (blank video). This Xvid file was the same file that was playing perfectly fine before the installations of the new software so I was very confused as to how this had happened. Interesting enough, ‘Windows Media Player’ was still able to play the file, none of the other players could.

Lots of different keyword searches on Google helped little, solutions ranged from file errors to RGB settings for the players etc. Two to three days into my search, I came across this advert for ‘BSPlayer’ and decided to install it, as my attempts to uninstall and reinstall both ‘GOM player’ & ‘VideoLan’ did not change anything, nor did reinstalling ‘Xvid’ & ‘DivX’ codecs help. Upon installing ‘BSPlayer’, I was pleasantly surprised how it searched through my PC to make sure I had all the right codecs, as it turns out I did not have four-five codecs installed, it asked if I wanted to install them, to which I said yes and to my surprise when I loaded up the video file, it played fine! How awesome is that!

Well done to the people behind ‘BSPlayer’ for creating my favourite video player!

 

And then there is some software which you regret you ever paid for… case in point, Evernote’s Ritepen. I purchased the software for my tablet last year and hardly ever used it as it would get most of the things wrong. Now I went online and was kindly informed that I would have to purchase the upgrade from version 3.0 to 3.1. Its not even a version 4! I am so annoyed with this that I have decided not to bother with the software. If there is one way to lose users of your software, this is it... greed does not increase revenues in the long run, Evernote! Shame on the company!