Advancing in a video file by one second at a time

Anyone who has ever attempted to get to a precise position in a long video file in Windows Media Player, has likely become frustrated by the inability to go forward or backward in precise increments - whether by one second, five, ten, or more. You jump forward X number of seconds, then scroll back X seconds without landing at the exact point in the video you want to begin a playback or start an excerpt from.

VLC Media Player has a solution to this problem. You can fix the exact number of seconds that it will fast forward when either the left arrow or the right arrow is pressed in conjunction with the SHIFT, ALT, and CTRL keys.

In the Tools menu, select Preferences:

Select the 'All' radio button at the lower left in the 'Show settings' section. This will shift the available settings which are displayed, and you will see a drop down menu available on the left named, 'Interface'. Within this subsection, click 'Hotkeys settings'.

Then on the right, scroll down to show the options for very short, short, medium, and long jumps backwards and forwards.

Here you can easily give yourself the ability to go back or forward in the video by different numbers of seconds when using hotkey settings with the left or right arrow keys.

Free emergency pass for OnCue

I was pleased to discover that OnCue includes an option for an emergency license which lasts 24 hours. See the red box in the 'Activate License' dialog:

It could come in very handy if you're stuck in a situation where you can't get online and your subscription has just expired. See the confirmation here from OnCue's support team that this option will work if your laptop is offline: https://www.oncuetech.com/articles/emergency-activation/p

BentoPDF - free PDF editor replacement for Acrobat

I have tested out more than one free PDF editor when I did not have Acrobat available. BentoPDF an online PDF editor, is the best of the bunch, and it includes many functions Acrobat users will be familiar with.

Some of the functions do not allow you to process multiple PDF files.

It does however include a Bates stamp tool which can apply Bates numbers to multiple PDFs.

There is no option in the 'Bates padding' field to apply stamps with leading zeros for numbers greater than six digits, but this limitation is easily overcome by adding zeros in the 'Customize Style' field which uses the identifier [BATES] for the starting number you select for the production. The only available fonts are Times New Roman, Courier, and Helvetica

As always, I'm testing the solutions I'm posting about with real data and can confirm that Bento gave results as promised.

It has an effective redaction tool which can be used with one PDF at a time, but does give you a way to select text to be redacted before those redactions are applied.

Tests confirm that Bento can convert multiple Word documents to PDFs, and it includes options to convert Excel, PowerPoint, JPEGs, and other formats.

Sadly, it will not OCR multiple PDF files.

Its tool to extract information from charts included in PDF files won't be making me abandon Abbyy FineReader's far superior tool, but it gives usable results. From this PDF:

. . . it extracted this data to a .csv file.

BentoPDF's promotional materials tout its rigorous privacy policy which ensures users that their PDFs will remain in their browsers.

However, you should note that it does offer a commercial version for a $79 fee which allows for it to be used in an application without disclosing the source code of the application.