Ever since we had access to the digital technology we gave up the old photo camera and the video camera and stored every single photo and home video on the computer. You can imagine that I have quite a large collection, so it's pretty annoying when I am looking for a specific video and it takes me about half an hour to find what I wanted to see for example at my daughter's birthday party and by the time I find it nobody is interested in watching it any more.

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Not to mention the old video cassettes with our wedding where you have to unwind the two tapes and to move them back and forth until you find the passage that you wanted to see and to realize that you are only deteriorating the tape. Well, now you can get rid of all this and put everything , all your video files on DVDs and enjoy them with your friends and family, also having the benefit of an incredible quality and the possibility to keep them safe for a long time. All you have to do is get some free DVD authoring software that will help you with your work.

First of all I am talking about free DVD authoring software, even if it does not have all the complex features of a commercial version because amateur people who only use this software once in a while can't afford to spend so much money just to edit their home videos and frankly, it's not worth it, because we are not professionals and we couldn't even use half of the features.

Here are some examples of free DVD authoring software you might want to try if you need : DVD - Lab Pro 2.51- it's only a 30 days free trial but I think it's enough if you use this period of time to edit most of your videos, 007 DVD author free , DVD Flick - free download and DVD Styler. You can use all these free applications to turn all kinds of video files formats in to DVD formats that can be played on the DVD player, so compatible with it and the computer, too.

Not only you can do that, but you can also use all the available tools to edit those video files and also enter menus and submenus and organize them for such a manner as to be able to find a certain file by the title you give to it.After doing all these you can burn the DVDs and arrange them in your personal collection and enjoy watching them from time to time.

So basically DVD authoring software is not just about copying or transforming files from one video format into another. It is about creating DVDs from home video files, editing them and organizing them so that it could make your life a lot easier and a lot more pleasant. It's about preserving your memories and keeping them in a safer place that also offers them an increased picture quality and the possibility to edit these images and add sound, commentaries, background and lots of other features that are available. It is essentially about the fact that you are the author of your home videos and can do whatever you want to with them.

"Free to try" software or demo-ware as some may call it, is the term referring to that particular software offered for free in shareware , but which has its limitations. It is different from the original version of the software in the sense that it is only a "demo", it gives you some idea about the software and lets you use it for a while to see what it can do, but you can't enjoy the whole package unless you purchase it.
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Usually this demo-ware or free to try software is used by the software distributors who want to offer you a short version of the software you are about to purchase. They think that pictures are more explicit than words and a demo can convince customers a lot better than any flier with the software description on - and they are right, as people want to know exactly what they are paying for.

Somehow I compare this free to try software with the  movies trailers presented in the cinema hall just before the movie starts : they show you a few images presenting the summarized plot and the actors playing the main roles and just enough action to get your interest and to make you want to see it.Software producers are often presented demo-ware by the software designers and writers in order to convince them of the importance and future success of their software and make them invest in producing the respective software.

Usually this free to try software allows you to use it only for a limited amount of time and after that it automatically uninstalls. However, if you want to uninstall it and install it again in order to use the free period once more , you can't do it, as the software has written a code somewhere in your computer that won't allow it and you will be able to use that software only after purchasing it. You may also have access only to the basic features of the software or maybe you will not be allowed to save whatever you where doing until then with the help of this demo software.Some other demos expire after you run the software a certain number of times and so on.

Nowadays most software application they you can find for sale on the internet online stores offer a free to try version to let you see what they are offering. Usually they let you download the genuine software after filling in the details of your credit card, but these free to try versions can be downloaded anyway without any charge but, like I said, with limited features. However, there are a lot of web sites offering exclusively free to try software and one of these is called even www.free-to-try.com.

Other similar web sites that might be interesting for you are: www.download.cnet.com, www.free-downloadable-software.com, www.electrasoft.com and many others. My strong recommendation for you is to always get the free to try version of a software before purchasing it in order to test it, to see if it is easy to install and to use and to see if it is what you were looking for or just a waste of time and money. After all, what you see is what you get and it is better to know exactly what you are buying instead of just guessing.

OCR means optical character recognition. The free OCR software is very helpful when you are dealing with documents that are only available in their physical form, that is you don't have an electronic version of them and you have to introduce them in your computer for editing, publishing them or using them in any other way . Well, it would take you a long time to re-type everything that is being written there, so why don't you try to look for a more simple and easy solution: first scan the documents and then use an OCR software to recognize the characters written there and after that save the document and feel free to edit it and use it as you feel like it.

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Free OCR 2.6 is an example of such free OCR software that is very easy to install and use. It supports multi page documents, faxesas well as most image types, including the compressed ones that are not supported by other software applications. This is the latest version of the software and it brings some new and improved features like the possibility to fix the minor bugs in PDF by rendering code, the introducing of the PDF button that can now open the PDF files that are already scanned by this OCR software, the possibility to select images from a scanned document and place them on the clipboard, crop the scans before using the OCR, a special button that was added with the purpose of removing the line break from the OCR text, the ability to fix the bugs that cause the OCR to crash when opening PNGs and finally a totally improved user interface.



Simple OCR 3.1 is the most popular free OCR software because it is very easy to install and use and because it offers a variety of useful tools.

It converts scanned images into editable formats like MSWord. The latest version came to meet the users' requests and added a tutorial and a validation stage. The only problem with this software is that you can use only the printed character recognition for unlimited free use. But the handwriting recognition id offered only as a free trial for a period of 14 days. After all free software does have its drawbacks. You can set up this software to read directly from the scanner or by adding a page with one of the following extensions: .jpg, .tiff, .bmp, etc. You can control the conversion from scanned document to editable document by using some features like text selection, image selection and text ignore.



You know that scanned documents are not always perfectly readable, so it's only normal to check the accuracy of a scanned document after it was converted by using the OCR software. That is why immediately after conversion it will pass through a validation stage where it will be checked and corrected. You can use the built-in spell checker or you can do this yourself. The last step would be to save the converted text into a .doc or .txt format that you can edit later.

Of course these are only two examples of free OCR software, but there are a lot more tools that you can use, too.