This is nothing to do with super yachts but instead is about making my life easier. It is the first of a series I am writing for The British Guild of Travel Writers in house magazine and I thought I would post it on my Blog too.
My computer is one of the most important tools of my trade (after my camera of course). I suspect this is so for everyone in the Guild whether like me they use it mainly for photographs or to write copy or perhaps for recording and editing.
I often think I spend far to long tied to my desk tapping away at my computer. But it would be much worse still without a number of useful, and cheap, software programs and utilities. In this and future articles I will share some of my favorites with you.
My first suggestion is a program called VLC media player and best of all it is FREE and cross platform (it will work on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux).
As the Web site says this “is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, mp3, ogg, aac …) as well as DVDs, Audio CDs VCDs, and various streaming protocols.”
Or to put this is English it will play back just about anything you throw at it without complaint. So if a friend has sent you an email with the message you really must look at this video and your computer refuses to co operate, just download VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ Then all you need to do is drag and drop the recalcitrant file on to the application and 99 times out of one hundred you will be able to see that video. I use it for everything, as my default movie player as it rarely has a problem with any file type I throw at it.
There are Mac users and there are those less fortunate beings who are beholden to Mr Gates. Because I belong to the former group this column may suffer from being over Mac orientated unless I get tips and tricks from other people who have PC programs they would like to share.
