Flip4Mac handles WMV files, and Perian handles nearly everything else.

The final player in the codec triad is A52Codec, an A52/AC-3 audio component. AC-3 is quite a common format on DVDs, so it’s nice to be able to handle it.

A52Codec is free and open-source.

 

While Flip4Mac addresses our ability to play WMV, there are a number of other formats that QuickTime won’t play without some assistance.

This assistance comes in the form of Perian, the “swiss-army knife for QuickTime”. Perian provides support for an extensive list of media types, such as AVI and DivX.

Perian is free and open-source. Donations are accepted.

 

A number of sites, for example, CNN, provide video only in WMV format.

Barbarians.

There’s fortunately an easy solution for this problem, provided by Flip4Mac. Flip4Mac provides a number of WMV components for the Mac, including a free QuickTime plugin, available for download from Microsoft.

The free player component works well, allowing access to WMV-only sites that we’d otherwise be shut out of.

Flip4Mac’s Pro and Studio versions offer features such as import, conversion, and export, and are available at a variety of price points.

 

Installing XP under Boot Camp is the Way of the Many Reboots; it takes just short of forever to get all the patches installed, even when starting from an SP2 base. Not something you want to have to do twice, but none of the usual backup utilities will backup or restore a Boot Camp partition.

Fortunately, there’s Winclone, a free utility to address this problem.

So far as I’ve been able to determine, Winclone is the only way to easily and reliably backup and restore a Boot Camp partition; I’m surprised that it’s not getting more press.

Winclone handles both XP and Vista partitions.

 

Tags: Backup, Windows