Lifehacker – Portable Ubuntu.

Windows 7 promises integration of video codecs out of the box, i really hope that its going to work as advertised, but for now, there are video applications that have codec’s integrated and players that you need additional codecs installed first and as everybody knows, video codec’s is something you need to play any kind of video.

Movie Player with integrated codec’s

You wonder how to play .mkv, .rmvb … files? Movie Player with integrated codec’s can be an answer for you! There are few popular applications in this group: VLC Player, SMPlayer(when downloading, choose “Package with installer”) and KMPlayer. VLC is most popular but does it mean that it is the best?

RMVB playback is my first benchmark. It is format that is problematic for many players. If our player should play everything, this is the format to see if its true.
VLC Player and SMPlayer passed this test(both of them supports Linux).

Take a look at iterface:
VLC Player (Interface is customizable by skins) : 

SMPlayer:

If you don’t care to much, simply choose what looks better for you. VLC is the one with support for skins
Both applications are great but there are few things that makes SMPlayer better.

Why?
- better playback of rmvb
- Stores information about movie to let you easily continue playback after closing application in middle of the movie.
- Subtitles looks little bit better(You might need to change character coding for your language, experiment with options in: Settings[ctrl+p] > subtitles > default subtitle encoding)

Why not?
-SMPlayer does not support skins like VLC, in fact it is skin/mod for MPlayer.

Movie Player with additional codecs

Codecs:
First you need some codec pack. K-Lite codec pack is the best one. There are few variants of this pack. I am recommending MEGA pack(during installation select playback essentials), it contains everything you will ever need.

Player: 
K-Lite codec pack has modified version of windows media player classic, it is enough for some of you. Need more? Sub-Edit is the answer.

Sub-Edit (No Linux Support) Sounds like application to edit some subtitles but it is so much more than this! This application is simply the best if you don’t have any problems with codec’s, this is the way to go! You can go full screen of second screen, fix un-synced subs, change height or width of movie easily and so on. Highly recommended app

Summary – best video/movie players:

If you want to always be able to play any file, use both applications, SubEdit if everything works great and SMPlayer with integrated codecs when something is wrong with movie in subedit. VLC on the other hand supports skins that can make it look like any other application!

Additional video players:
Dziobas Rar Player- simple, play videos in rar files, without extracting it. Simple and fast way to preview uncompleted torrents or watching movies when you have got no space left for extracting.
Miro- “is a popular, free, and open internet TV application. It brings video channels from thousands of sources and has more free HD than any other platform”

Additional codecs:
CoreAVC- This codecs is for h264 videos. This format is becoming standard for HD videos online. What makes this CoreAVC special? It is fastest for decoding h264 videos, so if your pc is not fast enough for standard codecs, try this one. Problem is that its not free, you might be lucky searching it on torrents:)

1. How to make it work

Download it from www.slax.org. You can even preset what modules you want so you are downloading exactly what you need. You have to unpack it on your clean storage formatted for FAT and to make it bootable, you need to go to boot folder and run:
for windows bootinst.bat 
for linux bootinst.sh

After restart, our storage should be seen in BIOS and Linux should lunch without any problems. We can choose few versions but default is KDE session. OS will show up after few seconds and you will be ready to work!

2. About SLAX

OS has a lot of typical tools met in KDE but the main advantage is possibility to launch additional modules on the fly what makes him clean on startup by unnecessary apps. For example, we can download module with Firefox from http://www.homesopen.com/slax6/index.html and put it in “/slax/options”. By GUI or commend “activate” we can choose our Firefox and enjoy our new program!

We can put commonly used apps to “/slax/base” so they will launch on auto start!

Of course we can launch not only applications this way, it can be drivers for your modem and another devices that don’t have support from kernel. There are many different OSes dedicated for USB like Damn Small Linux, Slitaz or Puppy Linux that i didn’t show you because right from beginning they are poor compared to slax. You can see it by size of this distributions even if we notice that Slax run on KDE. It is worth taking a look at Slax KillBill Edition that has Wine, DoxBox and Quemu or minimalistic version of Popcorn Edition with Xfce.

There are a lot of torrent clients like Azureus, uTorrent, BitComet, Bit Tornado and many more! Biggest problem is that most of them are created for windows. Linux users, don’t have such choice of torrent clients. Azureus, Deluge or maybe BitTorrent is enough for you!

BitTorrent

First of them is built in (Ubuntu) BitTorrent. Its very simple and basic program. Lunching file, selecting destination path and that’s it! Its showing some basic info’s and its giving you ability to limit download speed. Its enough if torrents aren’t something you do 24/h, just from time to time.

Azureus

(based on 5.0.4 version) is next torrent client. It’s popular for windows. Just write this command to get it:

sudo apt-get install azureus

That’s it, it should be at your disc now. Go to Applications-> Internet -> Azureus to lunch

Its very advanced software.Showing every data you need and sometimes you don’t. That’s why Azureus need a lot of you PC’s resources. Its based on java so you need it as well. Its using 45mb of your sys memory, that’s a lot. The reason for that is Azureus has many options out of the box that might be simply useless for standard users but required for all of you with need of full control and power.

Deluge

The last one is Deluge (based on 0.5.8.3), that’s gaining more and more users. Installation:

sudo apt-get install deluge-torrent

applications -> Internet -> Deluge BitTorrent Client

Its written in python and is very soft for your PC, using just 10MB of your ram. Everything is very clear and completed by wide selection of add-on’s.Its very stable and intuitive. Deluge works just great for casual user. For all of you that need more, you can install add-on’s that suits you.

Verdict

BitTorrent, this client is enough only if torrent isn’t something you care about and you are downloading 1 torrent per month.
Some of you need more, in this case-everything try Azureus as it has most of functions but remember that you need powerful PC to handle this client!
On the end there is Deluge that simply works, has all options normal user need(expandable by add-on’s) and uses 1/4 of your ram compared to Azureus.

Just go with Deluge, in most cases it will satisfy you.