Your Favorite Utility Programs

Video tools:

For video conversion (something I'm betting is similar to FormatFactory) I use Any Video Converter (Free, Windows). If you deal with Windows LiveMeeting files (which uses a strange fussy but highly compact codec), I have found it particularly useful in converting these meeting videos to other formats (I would convert them to XVID format, which is then editable in Camtasia).

Another useful transcoding trick is to upload a video to YouTube, mark it as private so it isn't viewable to anyone but you, and then download the transcoded version (MP4) for use in Articulate or other locations. You can then simply delete the file from YouTube. This gives you the power and reliability of YouTube's transcoding software, but the video is never made public.

A good tool for video is the free Windows utility Codec Information Appliance (I'm using the alternate title) which is a gem for finding out how a video was encoded and all the details about the video's file format.

web tools:

I love FancyBox (not platform dependent) for making those Web 2.0 "Lightbox" windows that allow you to pop-up a video or image on a web page without making someone navigate to a new page.

FoxReplace: Useful FireFox Extension if you are editing content within a web browser (in wiki for example) and you need to do search-and-replace.

Web Developer: Another great FireFox extension that helps in web design. Especially useful for troubleshooting layout problems or figuring out how someone did something on a page.

Audio:

foobar2000: With this free Windows sound (and other media) player you can designate "global hotkeys" to control the playback of audio. If you create screencasts and you record the audio separately from the video this can be handy because it allows you to start/stop/rewind the audio while the audio player is minimized.

Windows Utilities:

PathCopy: Allows you to right click on any file and copy the path to that file. In my opinion this should be built into Windows. Useful when you need to send the path of a file on your network via e-mail (which helps avoid sending big attachments).

I love software tools.