Our tech team has put together a list of software recommendations to help you get started. The list is by no means exhaustive; It reflects the opinions of the tech team and hopefully the rationale behind these decisions. (That might be too much to expect though.)

Players

Windows

For Windows, download the Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP) and install. The default settings in this will play most anime and included are two players. Use one of those players on their default settings. We highly recommend the CCCP as it is supported by some major groups and is thus more likely to stay supported/compatible in the future.

A viable alternative is the VideoLAN Client (VLC) player which should play most files straight 'out-of-the-box.' A codec pack is not necessary with this. However, this player has been known to have some problems.

Windows Media Player has been known to have problems with certain files so it is not recommended.

Linux

Linux has a fairly complete playback solution in the form of MPlayer. The version provided with your distro is likely to contain all you need for most file formats. There are a few caveats to using MPlayer, however. The player is predominantly a command-line tool, and the best results come from using it that way. Also, support for proprietary codecs, most importantly WMV3/9, are not quite complete. On 32-bit x86 systems, a binary codec can be substituted for flawless playback. On other systems, you will have to wait until internal support is complete. It may be worth building MPlayer from a nightly snapshot to see if anything has changed if you run into any problems.

On the rare occasions that MPlayer fails us, we keep the VideoLAN Client (VLC) player around as well. This plays some of the 'troublesome' formats out there.

Mac OS X

For Mac OS X, we recommend the same thing as Linux, but you may want to try with the VideoLAN Client (VLC) player first, as the default Mac install comes with a friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI).

MPlayer should catch anything that VLC misses, and it is possible to get a GUI for it as well.

Browsers

Windows, Linux, Mac OS X

Mozilla Firefox. We highly recommend this browser for various reasons; cross-platform support, standards compliance, open development, internal spell-checking, session restore. And last but not least, extensions. These make it simple to add extra functionality to Firefox. All this and more make Firefox, at the moment, in our opinion, the last word in browsers. Those of you using other browsers (you know who you are), feel free to be ashamed.

Windows

If you must use an alternative, Opera is always available. It boasts impressive standards support and a very nice Graphical User Interface (GUI). However, it does have a large memory footprint and has been seen to operate sluggishly.

Linux

Various browsers are available. Konqueror, based on the KHTML engine will support most things, but you may have problems with the user-agent string, due to it not being one of the 'major' browsers.

Mac OS X

Safari is based on KHTML and is quite a nice little browser on its own.

BitTorrent Clients

Cross-platform

Azureus, written in Java, should run on all Operating Systems (OS) for which a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is available. It's a fully-featured client, but it does have a large memory footprint and the overhead of running Java is there. This shouldn't be a problem for most modern computers, however.

Windows

A viable alternative is μTorrent. This client is well-featured and has a much smaller memory footprint, so it should be able to run on older computers with ease. Under no circumstances should you use BitComet or BitLord. Discussions on why are out of the scope of this document, but suffice to say that they are banned from many trackers for bad behaviour.

More explanations on BitTorrent are available on our forums.

IRC Clients

Windows

For Windows users, we provide a pre-configured script of mIRC. This is downloadable on our forums. For those of you who wish to set everything yourself, the basic mIRC client is the way forward.

Linux

Many options are available in Linux. For power, command-line users we recommend irssi. Others who prefer a Graphical User Interface (GUI) may like to try XChat. KDE users may like to try KvIRC which comes with an internal scripting language as well.

Mac OS X

For this platform, try ircle. It should provide the functionality you need, even for advanced users.

X-Chat Aqua is another viable alternative.

IRC explanations and help are available from our forums.