G-spot. Hmmm. One may be forgiven for not wanting to search the web for this useful little utility for fear of what may appear on your screen!

So I am puzzled as to the choice of name. But otherwise, the program is a super little aid to those downloading media content from the web.

G-spot deals with codecs. If you already know about codecs, you may skip this section, but for those puzzled;
A little information on codecs:

Media, in particular, digital video is encoded into all those noughts and ones that computers do so love to deal with. The methods of encoding and decoding vary, and the computer playing back the file must have the same decoder installed to support the file as the one uses to encode the file. These little "programs" sit dormant on your computer waiting to be called upon by your preferred choice of media player or media encoder to transform the binary digits into meaningful audio-visual information.

These information processors are called codecs. As in enCODer-dECoderS.

you will most probably have some codecs on your system already. PC users running windows will have, as part of windows, codecs to understand the most popular formats, such as WMV (windows media video) etc.

Where things become more complicated is with non-windows-standard files. Although they may share the same file extension, the codec between files may be different. The most common format for shared vido files is probably .avi - but there is not just one AVI (Audio Video Interleave) codec. So you may come across one avi file which plays fine on your system, whilst another refuses to play. There is a plethora of codecs out there - all designed with their own advantages and disadvantages - and each person who encodes files has their own preferred setup.

This problem became really prevelant with the advent of mass-file sharing. When kazaa or it's 'lite' variants was the tool of choice for obtaining all kinds of media - some shared legitemately - most not. Files were mistakenly labelled as "fake files" by people who simply did not have the necessary codec installed on their machine to play the video successfully.

G-spot was therefore a godsend. Simply open the offending video file with g-spot and it will give all the information you need as to which codec is required to play a file.

So - if you have a file which won't play - wait! Don't send it straight to the recycle bin in disappointment. Let G-Spot investigate it first - you will possibly find that all that is wrong is that you are missing the required codec.