The important part of the agreement is outlined below.

… The information which is monitored and collected includes internet usage information, basic demographic information, certain hardware, software, computer configuration and application usage information about the computer on which you install RelevantKnowledge. We may use the information that we monitor, such as name and address, to better understand your household demographics; for example, we may combine the information that you provide us with additional information from consumer data brokers and other data sources in accordance with our privacy policy. We make commercially viable efforts to automatically filter confidential personally identifiable information and to purge our databases of such information about our panelists when inadvertently collected…

The user has the option to go back, accept or decline the agreement. Back simply goes back one screen, accept will install Relevant Knowledge on the computer system while decline will not install Relevant Knowledge and exit the software installation.

Looking at the agreement it is obvious that Relevant Knowledge is collecting and monitoring information about the user, the computer system and usage. It is also clear that the collected information are combined with information from various other sources to create an extensive profile. Relevant Knowledge may also display surveys from time to time on the computer system. It is therefor clear that most anti-spyware applications and other programs that protect a computer system against malicious software consider Relevant Knowledge to be spyware.

Relevant Knowledge can be uninstalled from the Windows Control Panel. It has its own entry there. Uninstallation will not affect the software program it was installed with. Some developers, like those that develop SUMO, provide access to a lite version of their application which will install the program without the Relevant Knowledge addition.

Users who usually click-through installations should begin to pay better attentions to the dialogs presented to them to avoid installing programs like Relevant Knowledge on their computer system.

Users who swear on video players that rely on system wide codecs on the other hand can use a software program like Video Inspector that analyses video codecs and displays the information needed to play the video on the computer system.

The tool can be integrated in the Windows Explorer context menu to display information about the current video file directly. The alternative is to use the interface to browse the computer system for supported video files. It covers the popular AVI, Matroska, MPEG I, MPEG II and QuickTime containers which means it cannot identify other video formats like wmv.

Information about the video codec and audio codec are displayed immediately after loading a video into the software program. Various information about the video are displayed including the codecs used. Probably more important than that is the visual aid that is telling the user if the proper codecs are installed to play the video. A download button is present in case they are not to immediately download them to the computer system (using codecsdb.com).

Video Inspector comes with a few extra tools and options that include displaying all installed audio and video codecs, burning or converting the video to DVD, extracting the audio, splitting the video or changing the FourCC.

There has been some bad blood lately about products published by KC Softwares as they started adding Relevant Knowledge to their software programs. Relevant Knowledge actively monitors a user’s browsing and purchasing on the Internet. Many spyware and antivirus companies therefor classify Relevant Knowledge as spyware.

It has to be noted that Relevant Knowledge is only included in the full builds of the program. A lite version is provided on the same download page that does not include this component.

Viable alternatives to Video Inspector are G-Spot, AviCodec, Media Info or Codec Installer.