Showing posts with label windows. Show all posts
Showing posts with label windows. Show all posts

Friday 21 June 2013

Share Local Directory With Remote Server During RDP Session

Well I have to constantly rdesktop to the remote servers at my workstation and sometimes I have to copy files and folders from my local machine. This post will provide you the steps on how to share files and folders with remote server during rdp session. Normally, your RDP session would start with the following command:

$ rdesktop -g90% your_server


But we wish to do something extra i.e. we need to share our directory with the remote server. The good news is that the rdesktop command supports device redirection using a -r flag which can be repeated.

Your command would look something like below:

$ rdesktop -g90% -r disk:share=/home/samar/scripts myserver


You can then access your share as a drive or media. I hope this helps :)


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Monday 17 December 2012

Evince Rocks! Foxit Sucks

Been using foxit PDF reader for a while in Windows 7 while I was working on some windows-based project and I was totally pissed off with foxit.

Not being a fan of Adobe's PDF reader, I decided to try foxit PDF reader since some of the online reviews were stating Foxit to be a great PDF reader. Basically, I was looking for a very simple, fast, and lightweight PDF reader that suits me. Foxit has everything a good PDF reader should have. It works pretty well with any PDF documents I need to read. It is supposedly lightweight, fast, secure, and it has millions of users. But, it was neither fast nor lightweight in its default configuration, in my experience.

But its still lacking some feature, that I do not know. I just can not feel the software. I am not satisfied with the level of user experience this software imparts. What do you guys have to say about this??

Then I decided to use the famous PDF reader from linux world, the Evince. And, what can I say?

Evince ROCKS!!!





If you have not tried evince for windows, download it from Gnome's Evince page and try right away on Windows. It should work on Windows XP, Vista, and 7.

Download Evince




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Saturday 1 September 2012

Access Linux Filesystems In Windows Using Linux Reader

Earlier today, I had to access my HDD in Windows 7 through USB bridge which I had been using as an internal hard disk for my laptop but unfortunately it didn't. A quick googling revealed a very useful tool by Diskinternals.

Linux Reader is a free software from Diskinternals which excel in building recovery software solutions. Linux reader supports several filesystems used by Linux OS. Below is the list of supported filesystems:

  • Ext2/3/4
  • ReiserFS, Reiser4
  • HFS, HFS+
  • FAT, exFAT
  • NTFS, ReFS
  • UFS2

The program provides for read-only access and does not allow you to make records in file system partitions. This guarantees that the interference in an alterative file system will not affect the work of Linux later. Apart from this, it is necessary to note, that it gives you an opportunity to use common Windows Explorer for extracting data. A preview option for pictures is one more pleasant point, which is worth mentioning. While saving, it ignores file security policies. It means that it is possible to access absolutely any file on a Linux disk from Windows.

More details on Diskinternal's site

Download Linux Reader


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Saturday 28 July 2012

Download Windows Binaries For Python Packages

Someone from the University of California has made it easier for windows python users to install python extension packages easily by providing several 32-bit and 64-bit windows binaries for several scientific open source python libraries.

If you can't figure out your way in installing python libraries, you can download the binaries for several libraries from HERE.

Most binaries are built from source code found on PyPI or in the projects public revision control systems. Definitely the page to be bookmarked for the windows python'ers if you want to easily install python libraries :)


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How To Easily Install EasyInstall In 64 bit Windows

Easy Install(easy_install) is a python module (easy_install) bundled with setuptools that lets you automatically download, build, install, and manage Python packages. Easy Install gives you a quick and painless way to install packages remotely by connecting to the cheeseshop or even other websites via HTTP. It is somewhat analogous to the CPAN and PEAR tools for Perl and PHP, respectively. This How To will guide you in installing the easy_install utility easily in windows.

First download the ez_setup.py file.

Run the above script by typing in command prompt the following:

python.exe ez_setup.py


Once the script finishes, new directory "Scripts" will be created in the python installation directory and it will contain the easy_install.exe file in that directory.

Now all you have to do is add the Scripts path to system's Environment Variables to access this tool easily.

Right click on computer, go to properties, Advanced System Settings, Environment Variables, System Variables and edit the "Path" variable by adding correct path to the Scripts directory.

I hope this helps :)


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Sunday 10 June 2012

How Does Windows 7 Determine Internet Access Status

So I was curious on how Microsoft is managing to determine the status of internet access. I am a linux user and I have been thinking of having something similar to windows in ubuntu as well. Due to curiosity, I was tempted to dig further upon this and here is my finding.

What tool would be better than wireshark to analyze network traffics so I fired up wireshark in my friend's laptop. I took out the ethernet cable, started the capture in the ethernet interface, and then plugged in the ethernet cable back. I waited till the internet access status was shown at the right bottom(right part of taskbar) and stopped the live capture.

Now to the fun part, I analyzed the capture with my noob skill.

One particular entry was the DNS query for . Curios, I opened the site to find 403 forbidden error. I was now starting to think that Microsoft does the DNS lookup for this particular site and if it fails, Windows shows No Internet Access sign.

Wait!!! There's something more. Further analysis showed that a GET request is made for the file ncsi.txt to that website. Following the stream, I found out that the page contained the text Microsoft NCSI.



So this is what I concluded after this analysis:

Windows performs a dns lookup for www.msftncsi.com then after it succeeds, a request is made to http://msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt which should contain the text Microsoft NCSI.

I did a google search on Microsoft NCSI and THIS PAGE gives a detailed description on NCSI which stands for Network Connectivity Status Indicator.

If you guys have researched on this and found something different, please let us know by throwing a comment.


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Wednesday 28 March 2012

How To Fix NTFS Disk Partition From Linux

If you have problematic NTFS partition in your hard disk, you can fix many of the common NTFS inconsistencies from linux. Linux consists of a set of tools that allow you to manipulate and perform different types of actions on the NTFS partitions. This package is known as ntfsprogs.

If your linux distribution does not consist of the ntfsprogs package, you can install it by using the package manager tool that comes in your distribution or from command line. Debian and ubuntu users can type the following command:

sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

Now to fix the NTFS drive, we must first determine the partition we want to fix. We can use the simplest one, the fdisk utility to determine the partition of hard disk we want to fix. Type the following command to view the list of partitions:

sudo fdisk -l

If you have more than one HDDs and want to view partitions of specific HDD, you can always do so by issuing the commands such as sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda or sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb and so on.

Now lets suppose its /dev/sdb5 we need to fix. We can now use the ntfsfix command that comes in the ntfsprogs package.

sudo ntfsprogs /dev/sdb5

Note that it only repairs some fundamental NTFS inconsistencies, resets the NTFS journal file and schedules an NTFS consistency check for the first boot into Windows. You may run ntfsfix on an NTFS volume if you think it was damaged by Windows or some other way and it cannot be mounted.


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Friday 23 March 2012

How To Copy Text To Clipboard From Command Prompt

I had earlier posted about alternate data streams and the post consisted of texts copied from command line. I was on local IRC channel, one guy was curious if I was using the redirection operator to get the content from the command prompt. So I thought to share this simple tip to copy text from command prompt in windows. Follow the steps as below: 1) Right click anywhere on the command prompt window and then select the Mark option.
2) Now start selecting the text you need to copy using your mouse. You could keep on holding mouse and then do the selection. Alternatively, you could click on the starting point and then while holding the SHIFT key, click on the end of text you wish to copy.
3) After selecting the required text, just press Enter. Alternatively, you can right click on the top title bar of command prompt and then go to Edit -> Copy. If you are looking for copy pasting methods in linux terminals, you can read my article. I hope this helps some of you guys. :)


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Tuesday 20 March 2012

Some Fun With Alternate Data Streams

I have not been blogging for a while because of exams but now I'm free for few days so here comes another post back from my home village. This time, I'm going to share some basic funs with alternate data streams from theory to some practical stuffs.

What is Alternate Data Stream Alternate Data Stream(ADS) is a kind of file system fork which allows more than one data stream to be associated with a single filename. Alternate Data Stream was introduced by Microsoft as a part of its NTFS file system. Alternate Data Streams are not shown by Windows Explorer and even the dir command and size of ADS is also excluded from the file size. The dir command however allows us to view the alternate data streams using the dir /R command in Windows Vista and above.

One use of ADS could be hiding the information as alternate data streams in the file but beware that copying the file to non-NTFS file systems will make you loose the information in the ADS. ADS was originally introduced to store file information and properties however any user can hide any kind of information in the ADS. Some malwares have utilized the ADS to hide their code so most antiviruses today also scan the ADS of any file to find anything fishy.

Note that the format used to create(and access) ADS is filename:ADSname. A relatively simple guide I had written a while ago is HERE.

Now lets move on to some interesting stuffs and for that, I am creating a directory named "samar" in Desktop. We will first create a simple text file by using the command below:

echo An ordinary text file > ads.txt

Now lets add an alternate data stream by issuing the following command:

echo I am secret > ads.txt:private.txt

Lets issue the dir command to see what it lists:

Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 90E7-CBCA

 Directory of C:\Users\SINDHUS\Desktop\samar

03/20/2012  09:58 AM    <DIR>          .
03/20/2012  09:58 AM    <DIR>          ..
03/20/2012  09:56 AM                24 ads.txt
               3 File(s)             24 bytes
               3 Dir(s)  22,683,332,608 bytes free

We can see no information regarding the alternate data stream we just added to the file and lets see if the type command shows anything by just opening the file.

C:\Users\SINDHUS\Desktop\samar>type ads.txt
An ordinary text file

So where is the private stuff we've put as ADS in the file? Even viewing the file from windows explorer does not show the content in ADS and of course the size is also not included. The point here is the malicious user might add something bad in the alternate data stream and send to a normal PC user. The unsuspecting user will not know if there's anything other than just the text file. Now lets see how we can see the alternate data stream.

For a while, lets pretend that we don't know that the ADS is added in the file. So first we will use the commands to see if there's any ADS in the file. The simplest one is to use dir /R command as below:

C:\Users\SINDHU'S\Desktop\samar>dir /R
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 90E7-CBCA

 Directory of C:\Users\SINDHU'S\Desktop\samar

03/20/2012  09:58 AM    <DIR>          .
03/20/2012  09:58 AM    <DIR>          ..
03/20/2012  09:56 AM                24 ads.txt
                                    14 ads.txt:private.txt:$DATA
03/20/2012  09:58 AM               496 info.txt
               2 File(s)            520 bytes
               3 Dir(s)  22,881,669,120 bytes free

We can see that besides the ads.txt file, there is another entry ads.txt:private:$DATA. By examining this file, we come to know that the alternate data stream with the name private is present in the file ads.txt and the alternate data stream is nothing but just the data. However, as stated earlier, only Vista and above contain the dir command that lets us list the alternate data streams. In such case, you can download a small utility named streams from Microsoft Technet. The streams tool also allows us to delete the ADS easily which is possible but a bit obscure for normal PC user. Now to view the content of the alternate data stream, we will use notepad:

C:\Users\SINDHUS\Desktop\samar>notepad ads.txt:private.txt

Note that this time we didn't use type command since it does not support the use of colon in the command. We used the notepad but we could also use another command known as more as below:

C:\Users\SINDHU'S\Desktop\samar>more < ads.txt:private

I am secret

The fun with ADS just does not stop here. We could do much more than this but the basic idea is same. We can embed executables and codes within the ADS and run those executable whenever necessary. I'll leave this as homework for you guys since it won't be hard to figure it out once you've understood the basics I've discussed above.

The alternate data stream has already been exploited in IIS, the primary web server from Microsoft. Following is the example I've taken from OWASP on how it could be exploited in IIS.
Normal access:
http://www.alternate-data-streams.com/default.asp Show code bypass accessing the :$DATA alternate data stream:
http://www.alternate-data-streams.com/default.asp::$DATA

Last thing I would like to discuss is how to delete the alternate data streams. The streamers tool provides a -d switch to delete the ADS and it also supports the wildcards for deleting the streams. Another way of deleting the alternate streams is to copy the file in non-NTFS drives such as to FAT32-formatted pendrives and then copying back. Of course, you could also save the content of main stream in another file and then delete the original file that consists of stream.

I hope this helps you. Please let me know if I should add something to it. :)


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Saturday 24 December 2011

Hiding Information In Text Files Using Notepad [Windows]

Hi everybody, I had long ago read about hiding information inside text files using notepad and today I suddenly remembered while doing some other task. So I am sharing this little trick of hiding information inside the text file using notepad.

Open command prompt (Run-> Cmd) and then navigate to the directory (using cd command) where you want to save your text file. Now, type the following command:

notepad file.txt:mypassword


Replace filename part and password with yours as shown in the screenshot above and then you will be asked if you wish to create a new file or not(See the screenshot below) and then click on Yes to create the file.



Now enter your secret information in the file and save the file. Close the file and if you need to access the contents later, you will have to use the exact command you used while creating the file. If you or someone else edits your file without giving the password, your original hidden content will not be erased and you can still access the content with your original command.

I hope this trick is new for you. :)


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Saturday 29 October 2011

Bulk Image Resizing Tools For Windows

You will most likely find a situation when you need to resize multiple images at once. One example is while uploading pictures taken from high megapixel digital cameras. I had the same situation and googled to find few useful softwares for windows which I am going to list here.

1) Picture Resizer: An easy-to-use and free standalone tool for batch resizing of JPG pictures and photos. The tool is using high-quality resizing method, where color of each pixel is a weighted average of all covered pixels from the original image. Linear interpolation is used when zooming in. The algorithm is optimized to work with gamma-corrected pictures.

2) Fotosizer: Fotosizer is a free batch photo/image resizer tool. It lets you resize hundreds of photos in a matter of minutes in a quick and easy way. With Fotosizer, you can shrink JPEG image files, along with other supported formats, and dramatically reduce internet transfer times, enabling you to quickly and easily prepare your image collections to be published on the web.

3) Imagisizer: Imagisizer is absolutely the easiest, straight forward, image resizer and
converter around. It supports major image formats such jpg, png, gif and bmp. You need .NET framework for this tool to work which is bundled along with most moder Windows OS I guess.

4) PhotoResizer: Simple tiny sized batch resizing tools supporting multiple formats in input but only jpeg as output.

I hope some of these tools count useful for you as well like they did to me.


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Friday 28 October 2011

How To View System Information In Windows

You can easily view the information about your system using a simple command in windows. The systeminfo command lets the administrator query for basic system configuration information.

The command produces significant amount of information that might be useful for system troubleshooting and other purposes.
Open the command prompt by typing "cmd" or "command.com" in Run option.
To find information regarding your system, type systeminfo in the prompt. In few seconds the command will produce the output about basic system configuration. Example output is shown below:

Host Name: COMPUTER-1164
OS Name: Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS Version: 5.1.2600 Service Pack 3 Build 2600
OS Manufacturer: Microsoft Corporation
OS Configuration: Standalone Workstation
OS Build Type: Multiprocessor Free
Registered Owner: Bugs Bunny
Registered Organization: Warner Brothers Movie World
Product ID: 76487-640-1457236-23040
Original Install Date: 26/10/2011, 22:24:31
System Up Time: 0 Days, 1 Hours, 16 Minutes, 12 Seconds
System Manufacturer: ECS
System Model: G31T-M7
System type: X86-based PC
Processor(s): 1 Processor(s) Installed.
[01]: x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 1 GenuineIntel ~2793 Mhz
BIOS Version: 073108 - 20080731
Windows Directory: C:\WINDOWS
System Directory: C:\WINDOWS\system32
Boot Device: \Device\HarddiskVolume2
System Locale: en-us;English (United States)
Input Locale: en-us;English (United States)
Time Zone: (GMT+05:45) Kathmandu
Total Physical Memory: 2,038 MB
Available Physical Memory: 1,367 MB
Virtual Memory: Max Size: 2,048 MB
Virtual Memory: Available: 1,995 MB
Virtual Memory: In Use: 53 MB
Page File Location(s): C:\pagefile.sys
Domain: WORKGROUP
Logon Server: \\COMPUTER-1164
Hotfix(s): 342 Hotfix(s) Installed.
[01]: File 1
[02]: File 1
[03]: File 1
[04]: File 1
**Snipped To Save Spaces**

NetWork Card(s): 1 NIC(s) Installed.
[01]: Atheros L2 Fast Ethernet 10/100 Base-T Controller
Connection Name: Local Area Connection
DHCP Enabled: Yes
DHCP Server: 192.168.1.1
IP address(es)
[01]: 192.168.1.2


Since the output command produces large lines of output, it is better to save the output to the text file and later analyze the text file. The redirection operator can simplify this task. The command below would save in the filename specified:

systeminfo > filename.txt

The output will be saved in the specified filename. Also, the information can be saved in different formats which can be specified as below:

systeminfo /FO CSV > filename.txt

Other values /FO takes are TABLE and LIST.

I hope this helps you. :)


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Wednesday 26 October 2011

Bleeding Life 2 Released By Blackhat Academy

Bleeding Life 2 is a browser exploit pack that affects the web browsers on the Microsoft Windows operating system with remote code execution and buffer overflows. The tool can be used to launch client side browser exploits to the vulnerable users.

The wiki page of Bleeding Life enlists the exploits and features of this tool.

For download, click HERE.


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Sunday 9 October 2011

Rip Audio CDs With Windows Media Player

You need not download any other Audio CD ripping software in windows to rip your Audio CD as Audio CD ripping can be easily done with windows media player. I was thinking I might need to download ripping tools but I just guessed WMP might also have such feature and yeah it had easy way to do so. I'm here to help those non-techie people out there rip the audio CD.
First insert your Audio CD and play it with windows media player. There's a ripping option directly available in the interface. The screenshot provided below will help you to adjust your ripping settings. You might want to adjust the rip settings from the interface itself. Then select the tracks that you want to rip and click on the Rip CD button. Ripping will take few minutes and then output folder will open.



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Monday 3 October 2011

How To Activate Administrator Account In Windows 7

Many of you might be wondering where is the administrator account in windows 7 that used to be available by default in win XP. By default, the administrator account is disabled in windows 7 and you will learn the simple way to enable that account.

First, run the command prompt with admin rights. For that, navigate to C:\windows\system32 and right click on cmd.exe and click on Run as administrator. Now type the following command in the command prompt and you are good to go.
net user administrator /active:yes

On success, you would see the message as in the screenshot below and now your admin account is enabled for logging in.


Disabling is not difficult either. I guess you've already figured it out. Just type the following command to disable the administrator account.

net user administrator /active:yes

I hope this helps. :)


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Monday 29 August 2011

More Multi-Tabbed Putty Tools

In the previous post, MTPuTTY(which was written in native win32 code) was introduced as the solution for multiple tabs in Putty. But there are few other solutions already for multiple tabs in PuTTY which I am introducing in this post.

Both the tools I am talking about require .NET framework 2.0 to function which was not the necessity of MTPuTTY.

The first one is PuTTY Connection Manager addon. PuTTY Connection Manager is a free PuTTY Client Add-on for Windows platforms which goal is to provide a solution for managing multiple PuTTY instances.


For more details and downloads, visit official site.

Another tool is PuTTYTabs which reads the Registry information of PuTTY and opens a new tab for each opened window by the user. The source code of PuttyTabs is also available for download.

For more details and downloads, visit official site.



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Putty with Tab using MT-Putty

If you are familiar with SSH, you've most likely used Putty for SSH logins, tunnelling, etc. One bad thing about putty is we need to open separate windows for each connection but TTY Plus has developed MTPuTTY as solution for this.

MTPuTTY (Multi-Tabbed PuTTY) is a small free utility enabling you to wrap unlimited number of PuTTY applications in one tabbed GUI interface. You are still continue using your favorite SSH client, but you are no longer messing around with PuTTY windows - each window will be opened in a separate tab. However, as of now, it is for only windows system.

Features:

All PuTTY features
Supports all PuTTY protocols - SSH, Telnet, Rlogin, Raw. Supports PuTTY session. You can control and change PuTTY command line parameters. You can run PuTTY configuration from within the program.

Automation
Can automatically login the remote servers and "type" your passwords. Can run any script after login. Can "type" a script in several PuTTY tabs simultaneously.

Easy to use
Clear tabbed user interface. Servers are grouped in a sidebar. Taskbar to quick access to basic program tasks. Any PuTTY tab can be detached and converted into a general PuTTY window.

Smart code
Native Win32 code - no need to have any libraries (like .NET, VB etc). Multithreaded automation tasks - freezing in one PuTTY tab will not freeze the other ones.

Download MTPuTTY


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Friday 19 August 2011

BleachBit : Disk Cleanup Utility For Windows and Linux

Bleachbit is a free and open-source utility that can be used to clean Junk space to free disk space and maintain privacy.

BleachBit quickly frees disk space and tirelessly guards your privacy. Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean 90 applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari,and more. Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source.


Downloads and more information available at Bleachbit SourceForge Page.



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How To Crack Windows 7

This guide is not written by me as I never use windows 7 but one hacker friend of mine found this and sent it to me so I thought why not post for everyone out there to try this stuff to have no need of activating their windows 7.


If anyone knows who was the original author of this little guide, please post in the comment so that I can edit this post to give proper credit to the author.

First you will have to download Windows 7 loader from the link below:

http://www.datafilehost.com/download-ba73398b.html

Click install.
After that;

Remove update KB971033

1. Click start and search 'windows update'
2. Hit Installed Updates. If that link isn't there, hit "view update history" and hit the "installed updates" link at the top.
3. Find update KB971033.
4. Right click it and hit 'uninstall'
5. Restart your compy ;p
6. Go into Windows update again
7. Find the update KB971033
8. Right-click and hit 'hide update from installing'

If that didn't work, open a cmd and type:

slmgr.vbs -rearm

Then you never have to activate again:D





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Sunday 31 July 2011

Download Subtitles For Movies While Watching

Hi everybody, my apologies for not posting frequently but I'm busy with my end semester exams. Today, I am going to talk on how you can download subtitles for the movies you are watching in your VLC player or totem media player.

1) VLC: VLC from videolan is one of the best media players and my personal favourite as well. This open source player is simple yet pretty much powerful. In vlc, you can download subtitles for the movies you are watching by installing the lua script for subtitle download.

A little info about LUA: Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

So all you have to do is grab subtitles finder script and then install the lua file in the proper directory according to your system.

You must put the file in the folder:
- Windows (all users): %ProgramFiles%\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\extensions\
- Windows (current user): %APPDATA%\VLC\lua\extensions\
- Linux (all users): /usr/share/vlc/lua/extensions/
- Linux (current user): ~/.local/share/vlc/lua/extensions/
- Mac OS X (all users): /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/share/lua/extensions/

This script currently gets the subtitles from OpenSubTitles.Org and to use this tool, start the movie in VLC and go to View -> Subtitles and then you can search the subtitle from there easily. Also, there is a upload feature though I've not checked it.


2) Totem: Totem is my another favourite player for being simple and quite fast. This one even does not need any extra plugin/extension to be downloaded. The subtitle downloader plugin is already there within the player but most of us don't know that it is available. To use the plugin, just activate it from the Edit -> Plugins and then just go to View -> Subtitles -> Download Movie Subtitles.

If you are looking for some other alternatives, try splayer.

I hope this works well for you. :)

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