Now – if you do a lot of HTML work, you will have seen codes that represent colors. These codes include letters, and are in hexadecimal. The letters are actually numbers but because the characters we commonly use are in base 10, i.e. the digits 0 through to 9, we have to use letters to represent the numbers 10,11,12,13,14 and 15. This is because hexadecimal is base 16, and has 16 digits including zero. We don’t use two characters in a hexadecimal number until we get to the number 16, which is actually “10”. This represents one sixteen. The hexadecimal number “18” is actually sixteen plus 8, which is 24. The hex code “1F” represents 31 in decimal because we have one sixteen plus 15. Get the idea?

Okay, so we can mostly work out what a hex number in decimal is when we only have two characters. One digit represents how many “16”s we have, and the other is simply counting from zero to fifteen. So the highest number we have is “FF”, which is fifteen times sixteen, plus fifteen. The answer is 255. Already you can see the benefits of hex, because in binary that number would require eight characters, and we’ve done it in two.

So how do we solve bigger numbers into decimal easier? The answer is to split each hex character into its binary equivalent. So the hex number 8FA4 becomes in binary 1000.1111.1011.0100. Here we can see each number that makes up the ultimate answer. Starting from the left we have a 4, a 16, a 32, a 128 etc… all the way up to the last character, which is a 32,768. Add all the numbers represented by ones together and we have 36772. So our hex code of 8FA4 is actually 36772 in decimal. Four characters to represent something that is sixteen characters in binary is very impressive indeed.

If you remember back your hex codes in HTML that represent colors, you’ll notice that you have hex codes of 6 characters. The first character represents 16’s, the second 16’s to the power 2, the third is sixteen to the power 3 and so on. If you work it out, the largest number you can have with six hex digits is 16,777,215. Nearly seventeen million colors represented by only six characters.

It’s main features include…

Convert PDF to Word
Convert PDF to Word with all text and Graphical data.
Convert PDF to RTF
Convert PDF to Rich Text Files. You can edit all text and graphic by Windows Wordpad.
Convert PDF to TXT
Convert PDF to plain text files. You can edit text by Notepad.
Convert PDF to Images
Convert PDF to BMP, JPG, GIF or TIF files.
Convert PDF to HTML
Convert PDF to HTML files and automatically generate the Index file.
Convert PDF to SWF
Convert PDF to Shockwave Flash Animation files which can be published on websites.
Page Selection
Convert all the pages, or partial pages of PDF file.
Easy to use software
Add a PDF File -> Select the Output File Format -> Click on Start Converting button, then just have a cup of coffee :)

This software is normally $29.95 but is completely free until February 5th 2011.  You can download your copy here where you will also find a product code.  The best thing about all this is that it’s just a simple download and there’s no need to register with the website and give away all your marketing details.

So for free software, this utility to make your PDF files editable again is an absolute must have!  You can download your free copy here.

There are so many supported file formats that it is impossible to name them all. I try to list the most important ones. It supports the most important text formats, such as doc, txt, pdf, rtf and Open Office, many zip formats such as zip, rar and cab. It supports 17 movie formats such as avi, mpg, mov and mp4 and more than 40 audio formats.

The process itself takes some time depending on the size of the file which seems to be the major factor of course. A second option that the service offers is to upload a file and let the service convert the file for you. The time that this process takes depends of the upload speed of your internet connection.

The major advantages of using the media convert service is that you can use their service to convert a needed file into a format that you can edit and read using your computer and that you do not need to install a software to convert files anymore.

You do need two freeware programs for the whole procedure. The first is called Super. Super is a great converter that is able to convert to many formats including a DVD compliant MPEG II format. The second freely available application is DVD Styler which we will use to create the navigation of the DVD and the DVD iso file. We can finally burn the iso image using a program that is able to burn such images.

Start Super the video converter and change the following settings. The output container should be mpg (MPEG II). Everything else can remain the way it is. Drag and drop a avi file into Super and click on Encode (active files). Super will start the conversion and output the new mpg file in the directory where it is installed. The process might take a while depending on your cpu, graphics adapter and the size of the movie.

Once the conversion is finished we start DVD Styler and create our DVD menu which will later be used to navigate the DVD and start the movies that have been added to it. DVD Styler has a somewhat unusual interface which requires some explanation.

Action defines the next step after the first button is pressed. We want to play the first movie which is the default value for the first button. Add a second button to the menu and name it accordingly. Now we want the second movie to start which means that we have to select Jump to Title 2 instead of Title 1.

Continue this for all the movies that you want on the DVD.

Start by selecting a background from the left background menu. Now add the newly created mpg files by dragging and dropping them into the lower bar of DVD Styler next to Menu 1. The movies should appear on the right side of Menu 1.

A very basic menu would look like the following. Click on the buttons tab on the left side of the program. Drag and Drop one of the buttons to the right pane. You can move it around and make it smaller or bigger. Right-click the button and select properties.

The first thing that we should do is change the label that appears in the menu. Rename button 1 to the name of the first movie.

You could also create separate menus for every movie. Do this by right-clicking the lower pane which contains menu 1 and all the movies that we have added to it. Select Add New Menu and Menu 2 will appear in the pane.

You do need to create a button that opens Menu 2. The process is similar to linking to a movie. Right-click the button and select properties. Choose Menu 2 in Jump to and the link has been created.

Adding screenshots or boxart is easy as well. Just drag and drop them into the menu area and place them accordingly. Once you are satisfied with the results click on File in the menu and select Burn DVD. Select the temp directory and the output directory. Make sure you have enough space in both.

You can find further help in the DVD Styler wiki.

Vdownloader is a little freeware program that scans your clipboard for links to youtube, google video, grinvi and dailymotion. Once it detects such a link the movie will be automatically downloaded and converted to the format that you specified in the settings. You may save the video as avi, mpg or psp and change the output size and audio bitrate in the process.

Converting youtube videos did not take long at all. A 2 minute video was downloaded and converted in about 2-3 minutes to mpg. I was trying the same on dailymotion and it was working fluent as well. It takes a little bit longer to convert larger videos of course but it still the fastest way that I know of. It is basically a one click download and conversion program.

The Riva FLV Encoder helps us to convert the downloaded flv files into avi, mpg, quicktime or wmv files. All you need to do is add a local input file (flv in this case) and select an output format by adding the extension to the file. If you want an avi file you simply name it video.avi in the form destination video file.

You may change additional parameters like movie size, bitrate, framerate and audio if you like. Please note that the results will not be good if you choose to increase the movie size for instance. Hitting Encode will start the process. Once that is finished you may preview the result and try again if you do not like the result.

Zamzar offers four different format categories which are: document, image, movie and music. Each category has a large list of formats that can be converted into each other. The following can be converted on the website:

• text formats: csv, doc, odp, ods, odt, pdf, ppt and xls.
• image formats: bmp, gif, jpg, tiff, ps
• music fomats: ac3, au, flac, m4a, mp3, wav, wma
• movie formats: avi, flv, gvi, mov, mp4, mpg

As you can see there are plenty of possiblities to convert formats into each other. The maximum file limit is 100 megabytes which should be sufficient for most purposes.

The free version supports only youtube but that should probably be enough for most users out there. The author offers plugins for five video sites that cost $7.99: dailymotion, blip.tv, google video, metacafe and myspace. Most users probably don’t need the plugin to enable the other websites.

iTube will automatically import any downloaded and converted movie to iTunes. The movie will then automatically sync with your video iPod (if you have one). You can still play the files in iTunes if you don’t have a video iPod.

Itube needs the .net framwork from Microsoft. It will check if the framwork is installed on your system, ff you do not have it installed it will prompt to download it.

Omniformat is able to convert 75 different document types, the emphasis lies on text and graphic documents. I can think of one reason for myself to convert documents to different formats: I sometimes download files that I´am not able to edit because they have been either created on a different operating system and my system does not support editing the file or I simply do not have an editor at hand for the document.

This could be the most prominent reason for most users of omniformat but there are or course more. Omniformat is able to watch a folder for new documents. Once a new document is added to the folder it will be automatically converted to a chosen format. An image could be converted to a text document using OCR for instance.