Media Cope

It is an all in one media player solution and lets you play audio & video files, cut them according to your needs or transcode them to other formats. In addition you get a photo cutter, resizer and much more. In short, it's as complete a media package as you're likely to get. It is called Media Cope. I've reviewed plenty of audio/video tools in the past, from mp3 joiner to video trans-coding tools. If you are an avid user of such tools, you will have a nice, albeit a little lengthy, collection in your start menu. Well here is one tool that can make that list a little shorter. The tag line doesn't overstate Media Cope's capabilities, when it says: "It is all you need". Media Cope combines the best open source software in the business to give you a killer application. It has mplayer for playing media files and uses ffmpeg for all the transcoding heavy lifting. Let us take a deeper look on what Media Cope offers. Media Cope supports all the major media file formats. It lets you play file formats mp3, avi, divx, mov, mkv, flac, rmvb, flv, vob, wma and mp4 to mention a few. In addition it also offers other mplayer functionality like speed change, ratio change, audio delay, framestep and screenshots etc._An Audio/Video Cutter Hop over to the next tab and you can now trim audio & video files to your liking. All the formats listed above and many more are supported. Open the file, you can use the slider to go the exact location you want to start the video clip from, click "Select Start" and the starting point will be set to the current slider position. You can choose the end point in similar fashion. Now choose the output file format and you are ready to save the trimmed file as an audio/video clip._An Audio/Video Converter The next two tabs let you trans-code your media files into a format of your choice. Queuing, output quality and trans-coding to and from all major formats are supported. I missed default presets or the ability to create and save your presets. Such an option is extremely useful if you trans-code files for playback on an iPod or any other device._Photo Cutter/Resizer/Converter Media Cope lets you do common photo tasks like resizing and converting to different dimensions and formats. The photo tools do a fairly good job and are great for batch processing. That said, I would stick with image editors for such needs mainly because of the interface and greater control and visual feedback they offer._Slide Show Media Cope also lets view your photos as a slide show. You can specify a background music and basic slide show configuration options. There is no option to export your slide show as a video file which makes it seem as misfit as a mere photo-browser amongst other tools._Internet Tools You can also use Media Cope when browsing the Internet. Media Cope offers text to speech functionality in Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers. You have to explicitly enable Internet tools from Media Cope's settings. Media Cope offers a number of tools to meet all your media needs. There are some glitches and the user interface could use some touch up. Even then the media player, cutter and trans-coders are straightforward and easy to use. MPlayer and FFMPEG form a deadly combo and it would be interesting to see Media Cope develop further and iron out some of the shortcomings. Enjoy it, I do! Thanks to MUO.com