1. Fix Audio/Video/Subtitle Sync Problems

One of the most annoying things that can happen on video playback is when the audio and video tracks do not sync up properly. Sometimes it’s a result of bad encoding software, sometimes it’s a result of a mistake by the person doing the encoding, but it’s always annoying. VLC feels your pain and includes a tool to adjust the delay for the audio and/or subtitle tracks to let you adjust things as needed. Just open Tools -> Track Synchronization to make your adjustments.

2. Watermarks/Overlays

Sometimes you may need to place some text or watermark into your video display (particularly when transcoding), and you don’t need a video editor suite to accomplish this. VLC’s got that too. Like some of our other tips, this can be found in Tools -> Effects and Filters, but this time under the Video Effects tab under Vout/Overlay.

If you want a graphic instead of plain text, you can do that with the Logo tab in the same section.

3. Control Playback Through the Web

If you’ve got your videos hooked up to play through a home theater PC, or just like to do remote control, you can command VLC from anywhere through its network interfaces for Telnet or Web. Just open View -> Add Interface -> Web Interface. It starts a small web server (you may need to adjust your system firewall settings to allow it) which can be accessed on port 8080. The web interface will let you start, stop, and set current playback and even adjust volume just as if you were clicking the buttons on the player window itself.

4. Mouse Gestures

Many people find mouse gestures to be a more natural way to interact with a computer than using buttons, and VLC has got those people taken care of as well. If you’re not familiar with them, mouse gestures let you use various click-and-drag motions to tell the application what to do. In web browsers, for example, you might drag the mouse anywhere on the screen from right to left to go back, instead of moving up to the corner for the button. It may not sound like much but many mouse gesture users will say it adds up.

To enable this feature, go to View -> Add Interface -> Mouse Gestures. You may need to restart VLC for the changes to take effect. The list of supported gestures can be found here.

Conclusion

As always, VLC delivers more than expected from a media player. There have been times when this author has run into some type of problem with a video and thought “I bet VLC is clever enough to have something for this…” and most of the time, I’ve been right. In case you can’t tell, I’m a fan.

Smooth Gestures is a Chrome extension that allows you to control your browser with mouse gesture. With a simple gesture , you can easily switch between tabs, go back one page in History or go forward. In short, you can quickly navigate webpages with minimal effort.

After you have installed it, you can immediately use it by clicking and holding the right mouse button and move your mouse around. You will see trail on the screen that tells you the gesture that you are drawing. Of course, it won’t work for any sort of graffiti drawing. You have to follow the set of pre-defined gesture for it to work properly. For example, to move back one page in History, simply draw a straight line from right to left. It doesn’t matter how long or big your drawing is, or where you execute your drawing (must be within the browser window). Similarly, drawing a straight line from left to right makes your browser go forward a page in History.

Some other gestures include:

Reload tab

Close Tab

Open status page

You can check out the Settings page for the full list of gestures.

Customization

It won’t be useful at all if there is no options for customization. In the Settings page, you can find all the available gestures. If there is any gesture that you find it uncomfortable to use, you can remove it by clicking the ‘X’ button and add your own gesture by clicking the ‘+’ button. A canvas will then appear for you to draw your own gesture.

You can add more than one gesture for each action, but you have to make sure that none of the gestures overlap with each other.

Other settings that you can configure include the color and thickness of the trailing line and also create your own domain blacklist to disable gestures on the included domains.

Some complaints

Smooth gestures does not work with all pages, especially for those sites that do not allow mouse right clicking. In such sites, you will see a mouse icon in your address bar.

Also, when you install Smooth Gestures, it will create a ‘Smooth Gestures Profile’ folder in your bookmarks with two system files used by the extension. Some users have complained about this issue, so if you are really paranoid about an extension messing up your bookmark, do not install this.

Have you used Smooth Gestures?

Mazzick

Mazzick is a nifty little mouse gesture applications that requires no installation. It is truly portable in that you can carry it in your flash drive and use it on any Windows-based computer.

Mazzick comes preinstalled with a list of gestures that you can use instantly. To activate the mouse action, you can either press the SHIFT button together with the mouse movement or move the mouse with the middle button (or the scroll wheel) pressed down.

You can easily create a new gesture by drawing on the testing board and enter the actions to be performed. One thing that I like is that you can define a series of keyboard shortcuts with a specific mouse gesture. For example, you are playing music with Realplayer and you want to pause the music while picking up the call, you can define a mouse gesture and enter

“<open=”realplay.exe” sleep=500><Ctrl+P sleep=200><Alt+Space sleep=100><Down sleep=50><Down sleep=50><Down sleep=100><Enter>”

in the parameter. What this string of command does is to Open Realplayer -> Pause/Play -> Minimize Realplayer. Isn’t this cool?

StrokeIt

StrokeIt has been around for quite some time and is quite popular with many Windows users. Weighing at 105kb, it is also the smallest mouse gesture application around.

To run mouse gestures, you just need to press (and hold) the right button of the mouse and move it around. While there is a pre-defined list of gestures that you can use, it can cleverly detect any unknown gesture and prompt you if you want to save as a new gesture/action.

The last active development for StrokeIt ends in 2005, so it is no surprise that most of the pre-defined gestures are for applications that no longer exist today. A good thing is, you are not restrict to these gestures and can change/remove the existing list to free up the space for new gestures.

Adding new gestures in StrokeIt doesn’t require you to draw on the drawing board. All the actions are available as a dropdown selection box. You will have to make several selections before the new gesture is ready for action. While there is nothing wrong with this way of adding new gestures, it is definitely not the most efficient way.

gMote

gMote is another great mouse gesture app that doesn’t require any installation. It is highly configurable and allows you to personalize the settings to your preferences. You can change the ways to activate the mouse actions, change the trail colors, enable timeout and set exclude programs (such as Firefox, Opera to avoid mouse gesture duplication).

Unlike other apps, gMote doesn’t come with a long list of pre-defined gestures. In fact, it has a big testing screen to encourages you to create your own gestures (by pressing the Create Gesture button) and choose from a list of actions that you want the gesture to perform. I like this feature very much as I prefer to create my own mouse gestures for my favorite applications rather than learning from the existing list of gestures.

Which mouse gestures application do you use?