Most of us have a fairly large collection of media files on our home computer. These could be our audio tracks, the photos we've taken on vacations or videos we've ripped from our own DVDs. There's little point using our laptop screen to view a movie or attempt to listen to our favourite tracks through the computer speakers. As your laptop or home computer is likely to have a VGA-OUT or DVI-OUT socket, you only need one cable to connect this to your TV. Problem is that you need some decent media management software to get the most from your collection.

Boxee for Windows and for Mac is an early preview version of this superb free open-source media centre technology that's designed to find and group together your media collection, connect your computer to your TV and watch your movies, photos and listen to your audio tracks.

Boxee for Windows and for Mac links.

If you're mad keen on a band that produced their music through the 70s or 80s (think Pink Floyd), you've probably spent time collecting both their CDs and rare tracks. Video performances will have been made available, but most likely imported to a computer and then encoded with an old codec that isn't supported by the mainstream video players, such as RealTime or QuickTime. Alternatively, it could have been encoded by a Mac-based codec, thus is not supported by Windows Media Player.

VLC Media Player 0.9.9 is a universal free media (video/audio) player that's been around for aeons. It's a cross-platform media player and packed full of the codes you'll require to play just about any video. The latest version contains a number of improvements and fixes, including improved performance on Intel Macs.

VLC Media Player link.

It's really easy to burn your own home movie these days. Even the free burning tool that shipped with your computer will enable you to create basic video and then burn directly to disc. Photo managers will collate your favourite images and then create a auto-running slideshow that will run from your disc. The problem is when you want to burn some of your old videos to DVD. For example, the old video of your favourite band that was filmed in the 90s and then encoded with a codec that has long-since been discontinued. Most recent disc burning tools will not bother supporting some of the older codecs as they either don't want to pay a license or do not think any recent user will need to burn old content.

DVDFlick 1.3.0.6 is a free DVD authoring tool that will enable you to source video content from a range of sources, add your favourite audio track and then burn to disc. It supports a wide range of video and audio codecs, so whatever you decide to throw at DVDFlick it will most likely support. This could be an old video you've sourced from the Internet in the 90s or a video you've managed to download from YouTube.

DVDFlick link.

Although Windows ships with the free Windows Movie Maker, it's fairly limited and not really suitable for anything but the basic video editing. The snag is, the next stage up means that you really need to know what you're doing. Apple's Final Cut Express or Pinnacle Studio are both home video editing packages, but really suited towards semi-professionals, perhaps who want to produce wedding videos on behalf of their clients.

Pinnacle VideoSpin 1.1 is a completely free video editor that enables you to do all basics with your home movies. Cut, edit and add various transitional effects. Add your own audio track, sounds and then get ready to export to disc or the web. It already has builtin support to upload your video to a streaming site such as YouTube, so you don't need to worry about hosting.

Pinnacle VideoSpin 1.1 download.

Instead of being flexible with consumers who spend money buying genuine DVDs, the manufactures make us sit through 'do not pirate this' videos, before we get to see the main event. We're then only able to see our DVD within our local region, so there's no point brining back a DVD from the States. Want to backup or store your movie on your home media server? Forget it, it's encrypted.

Handbrake 0.9.2 is a free tool that enables you to take a DVD and then remove some of these restrictions, so you can play back content on different forms of media. If you own the original DVD and only intend personal playback, this should be legitimate. The latest version of Handbrake enables you to produce a movie for playback on your iPod Touch or Apple TV, so you can move your favourite videos from DVD to storage on your computer.

We all have old movies we’d like to store and archive, whether they are old VHS cassettes or simply videos we've downloaded from the net and would like to store and watch offline. Life would be so much easier if we could save and edit these movies and then convert into interactive video discs. We could then delete the old movies and store on disc.

MAGIX Movies on CD & DVD 6 enables you to compile and burn Internet movies, digitally archive VHS tapes and easily optimise your digital camcorder recordings.

You can burn your photos onto conventional, low-cost blank DVDs in high-quality HD-DVD format using any standard DVD burner. With the easy-to-use interface, it makes for enjoyable home entertainment. Record, burn, and experience your movies, photos & music on your PC.

With numerous online portals offering film trailers, movie clips and documentary’s we inevitably come across videos which we'd like to keep and browse offline. Unfortunately many of these online portals offer a view-only policy, which is frustrating as this prevents the video from being downloaded.

Ashampoo ClipFisher 1.01 makes it possible for you to obtain such online videos. Simply copy the video’s current http:// address from the web browser and paste it into Ashampoo ClipFisher will then begin downloading the video directly on to your hard drive. Ashampoo ClipFisher 1.01 enables users to obtain view-only videos from portals such as YouTube, VideU, MyVideo, ClipFish and GoogleVideo allowing users to create their own video libraries.

One problem with video-editing software is that they are based around their own licensed codecs. If someone gives you some video for editing, you might not be able to open the video to make the changes. There are so many codecs and different formats that most consumer video editors stick with their own codec and expect you to import the raw video from your camcorder, not import from a local source, such as your hard drive.

VirtualDub 1.6.19 is a freeware video editing tool that's been around for a long while. It's different from other video editors in that it relies on the codecs that you have on your system to open and edit video. If you have something like the K-Lite Codec Pack installed on your system, you'll probably find that you can open and edit most sources of video. However, the video editing tools are rather basic and it will only export as an AVI format, which isn't too good for burning to DVD (however, there does seem to be a third-party MPEG2 module available).

How many of us own a web camera but use it for nothing in particular? Yes, there's always the option to use it with something like Skype or MSN Messenger, but do you really like the idea of someone else seeing you looking unwashed on a Sunday morning? Thought not. Most of us still prefer the anonymity of the phone or typing through messaging, rather than appearing on a webcam. However, you could use your webcam to monitor the security in your room or a room in your house.

Active WebCam 9.0 is the latest version of the advanced web camera software. Believe us when we say this tool has a range of options and can be daunting for webcam software. You can use the technology to set up your webcam as a security device, with motion detection. As soon as anyone enters your room, it starts recording and can upload the images to the web, so you can access the images remotely, keeping an eye on your home.

Capturing video and photos can often be a spur of the moment activity. You don't want then have to hang around, spend time with your DVD authoring suite, setting up the themes and navigation required to create your DVD movie. Sometimes it's great just to be able to grab the raw video and burn it directly to DVD. You don't need the fancy navigation or menus. You can create a DVD movie that starts automatically as soon as you press 'play' on your DVD player.

Sothink Movie DVD Maker 1.0 is a free tool that will do exactly this, it will take your raw video file, enable you to make basic changes to the size of the video and compression required, then will burn it directly to your blank DVD. Once created, simply stick your DVD in your player and it will start immediately.