Software for Playing Anime on a Computer

OS Independant

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

Windows

• MPlayer for windows, our preferred method for playing video in windows. Although you should change the priority of mplayer to normal if you use one of the gui's, otherwise mplayer has higher priority than the gui and can cause pain whenever you try to do something.
• CCCP, a nice simple "play everything" package.
• VLC, will generally ignore region encoding on DVD's, I have no idea for a use for that though.
• Media Player Classic, Is a small, compact program generally bundled with other packages. It provides an occasionally superior alternative to VLC.

Linux

• MPlayer, it'll do almost anything you want with enough fiddling.
• XINE, for DVDs. Supports menus.

Mac

The great Mac oracle did decree that mac has many a great media player, and a macs users order of preference should be as follows;

• Mplayer OSX Extended
• QT w/Perian
• NicePlayer
• Mplayer
• VLC

Some of those sound alot like web browsers, but mac users are best not argued with.

File Formats For Manga

Manga will generally come in rar, cbr or zip format. The only of these which should seem new to anyone who has used a computer is cbr which is just a renamed rar file commonly used for manga and other comic book scans.