Software

Most anime fans use their PCs to watch Fansubs / DVDs, and often there are problems with playback, or just plain hassle.

• Media Player Classic A very fast, flexible and powerful media player for windows.

• RobM's rather good series renamer script, runs in PERL and should work on any platform. Details on the linked-to page.

• Combined Community Codec Pack Includes everything you need to watch stuff - 2x media players (Media Player Classic & Zoomplayer) and all the codecs you need in a light-weight package. Note it uses ffdshow, which RobM hates
• K-Lite Codec Pack Solves all your codec related problems, as well as installing usful software such as Media Player Classic (see above) and GSpot, which you can use to get information on those unplayable files. This is the only codec pack that RobM recommends, as it doesn’t give you unneccesary codecs, and is careful to uninstall older version before installing newer ones - thereby avoiding the headaches of conflicting codecs.
• VLC While VLC is not as good in many respects as Media Player Classic (especially subtitle placement) it will play any region of DVD, making it very useful for watching many of the items in the library. VLC has all its codecs inbuilt so if you are using it you will not need the above packs.

• Mplayer for playing general media files. It’s massively configurable, and plays literally just about everything!
• XINE for DVDs. it supports DVD menus to a much better level than mplayer. Something to be aware of: It is rumoured that the ability to play DVDs in Linux has got one guy in some big trouble with the DeCSS case.