Here are some of the Recommended free programs that can help you instead of the commercial or pirated programs

CD/DVD Burners:

CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Everyone, even companies, can use it for free. It does not include adware or similar malicious components.

• burn all kinds of discs.
• audio-CDs with or without gaps between tracks.
• burn and create ISO files.
• data verification after burning process.
• create bootable discs.
• multi-language interface.
• bin/nrg → ISO converter, simple cover printing and much more!
• Operating Systems: Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista/Windows 7.

InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration.

InfraRecorder is released under GPL version 3.

• Create custom data, audio and mixed-mode projects and record them to physical discs as well as disc images.
• Supports recording to dual-layer DVDs.
  
• Blank (erase) rewritable discs using four different methods.
• Record disc images (ISO and BIN/CUE).
  
• Fixate discs (write lead-out information to prevent further data from being added to the disc).
• Scan the SCSI/IDE bus for devices and collect information about their capabilities.
  
• Create disc copies, on the fly and using a temporary disc image.
• Import session data from multi-session discs and add more sessions to them.
• Display disc information.
• Save audio and data tracks to files (.wav, .wma, .ogg, .mp3 and .iso).

ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit!

It has several ‘Modes’, each one for performing a different task:

• Read – Read a disc to an image file
• Build – Create an image file from files on your computer or network – or you can write the files directly to a disc
• Write – Write an image file to a disc
• Verify – Check a disc is 100% readable. Optionally, you can also have ImgBurn compare it against a given image file to ensure the actual data is correct
• Discovery – Put your drive / media to the test! Used in combination with DVDInfoPro, you can check the quality of the burns your drive is producing

ImgBurn supports a wide range of image file formats – including BIN, CUE, DI, DVD, GI, IMG, ISO, MDS, NRG and PDI.

It can burn Audio CD’s from any file type supported via DirectShow / ACM – including AAC, APE, FLAC, M4A, MP3, MP4, MPC, OGG, PCM, WAV, WMA and WV.

You can use it to build DVD Video discs (from a VIDEO_TS folder), HD DVD Video discs (from a HVDVD_TS folder) and Blu-ray Video discs (from a BDAV / BDMV folder) with ease.

It supports Unicode folder/file names, so you shouldn’t run in to any problems if you’re using an international character set.

ImgBurn supports all the Windows OS’s – Windows 95, 98, Me, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008 and 7 (including all the 64-bit versions). If you use Wine, it should also run on Linux and other x86-based Unixes.

It’s a very flexible application with several advanced features that are often lacking in other tools, especially when it comes to burning DVD Video discs. It supports all the latest drives without the need for updates (including booktype / bitsetting / advanced settings on many of the major ones – i.e. BenQ, LiteOn, LG, NEC, Plextor, Samsung, Sony).

There is an image queue system for when you’re burning several images (which you can automatically share between multiple drives if you have more than one) and an easy-to-use layer break selection screen for double layer DVD Video jobs. The Automatic Write Speed feature allows you store your favourite burn speed settings on a per ‘Media ID’ basis, right down to a drive by drive level. Data captured during the burn (write speed, buffer levels etc) can be displayed / analysed using DVDInfoPro.

Whilst ImgBurn is designed to work perfectly straight out of the box, advanced users will appreciate just how configurable it is.

System Utilities and Tools:

CCleaner is a freeware system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. It removes unused files from your system – allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. Additionally it contains a fully featured registry cleaner. But the best part is that it’s fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware!

Unlocker is a free toll that help you to unlock files and folders and delete them or move them, here is some cases it can help you with:

• Cannot delete file: Access is denied.
• There has been a sharing violation.
• The source or destination file may be in use.
• The file is in use by another program or user.
• Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

Graphics and Design:

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms. But basically the same code also runs on MS Windows and Mac OS X.

• Painting
  • Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
  • Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing.
  • Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool.
  • Supports custom brushes and patterns.

• System
  • Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
  • Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time

• Advanced Manipulation
  • Full alpha channel support.
  • Layers and channels.
  • Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace).
  • Editable text layers.
  • Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip.
  • Selection tools including rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy.
  • Foreground extraction tool.
  • Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
  • Transformable paths, transformable selections.
  • Quickmask to paint a selection.

• Extensible
  • A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu.
  • Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl).
  • Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters.
  • Over 100 plug-ins already available.

• Animation
  • Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format.
  • MNG support.
  • Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package).
  • Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package).
  • Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package).

• File Handling
  • File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others.
  • Load, display, convert, save to many file formats.
  • SVG path import/export

• Much, much more!

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It  features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help,  tutorials, and plugins.

It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool. It has been compared to other digital photo editing software packages such as Adobe® Photoshop®, Corel® Paint Shop Pro®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP.

Video Players and Encoding Tools:

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

Supported sources:

• Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (unencrypted–protection methods including CSS are not supported internally and must be handled externally with third-party software and libraries), and some .VOB and .TS files.
• Most any multimedia file it can get libavformat to read and libavcodec to decode.

Outputs:

• File format: MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM.
• Video: MPEG-4, H.264, or Theora (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer/rate encoding).
• Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks).

Misc features:

• Chapter selection.
• Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture).
• Integrated bitrate calculator.
• Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling.
• Grayscale encoding.

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

It doesn’t need any external codec or program to work.

and more programs will be added