We can often see some interesting or cool animated GIF images in forums or social apps, which generally originate from some classic movies or video clips. A lot of people want to know how to make such kind of GIF animations. The approach of "capturing each frame + manual merging" is too inefficient and even stupid. Fortunately, we have QGifer this convenient tool for use.

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope (WWT for short, now called AAS WorldWide Telescope) is a free and open-source virtual, visualized digital planetarium project (including application, data and cloud services) for both web browser (based on HTML5 and WebGL) and Windows desktop. It was originally created by Microsoft Research in 2002, and is now managed by the American Astronomical Society, and supported by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and National Science Foundation.

MKVToolNix (AKA: Matroska Toolkit) is a free, open-source and cross-platform collection of tools primarily used to perform merging, splitting, encapsulating, extracting operations to MKV format of videos, audio tracks, and subtitles.

Although the MPlayer from Hungary is extremely powerful, for most common users, its command-line operation mode is really inconvenient, even though it comes with a graphical user interface called GMPlayer. While most often the features of a media player that we require are nothing more than concise user interface, smooth playback, support to as many media formats as possible, and some customizable functions for advanced users. All these requirements are implemented in SMPlayer.

If you are a 3D animation enthusiast, you probably have tried many 3D production software such like Maya, 3ds Max, most of which are extremely expensive for individuals and small businesses. Fortunately, there is an alternative that can compete with them on functionality and performance, and is free, open-source, cross-platform, very lightweight and full-featured 3D creation program - Blender (from Holland), which provides a series of solutions for producing animated short films, including modeling, animations, materials, rendering, audio processing, video clipping, and more.