We'd much rather it defaulted to the last open folder than popped up a page of promotional content to movies we don't own.Universal media player with multi-platform support, providing best enhanced HD & 3D video quality It also insisted on opening by default on the BD/DVD movie page, which is full of links to movie trailers and info, or 'Featured Celebs'. It's a small point, but we were surprised to find that the PowerDVD window didn't respond to all the usual Windows 7 shortcuts for moving and maxiximsing the window - such as drag to top of screen, or Windows key and cursors to snap to screen edges. It's not as powerful as a dedicated music or photo app, so there's no way to sort albums by year of release, or to tag faces in photos, for example.
You can quickly browse through media files from all these sources, download files en masse from online. It will pull in content from local storage, attached devices, UPnP and DLNA servers, and popular online site such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The interface is straightforward enough, with locations for your content listed on the left and a big browsing and playback pane in the centre. We could try and justify this by talking about Trutheatre image processing, or the pseudo 3D mode - but it's really here simply because we love Indy If you like to watch pick-and-mix favourite scenes from movies, something that PowerDVD encourages with its bookmarking and sharing features, then there's fun to be had here - but we doubt many will get through a whole movie using it. Sometimes it works quite well, but it's inconsistent and this makes it very tiring to watch as your eyes struggle to make sense of what is often nonsensical. We've seen the latter applied to DVDs and other video files before, and can't say we've been terribly impressed. The two big new features for Blu-ray playback are support for DTS-HD 7.1 soundtracks and the ability to apply 3D upscaling to Blu-ray discs. This latest version has extensive file format support, including popular container formats such a MKV, and had no problem playing any file we threw at it. The simple disc-spinning software has grown into a media playback suite with wide support for video, photo and music files. These days it's Blu-ray playback that doesn't come as standard, and so PowerBlu-ray may be a better, if somewhat clunky title.Įven that moniker wouldn't describe what you get from PowerDVD today.
PowerDVD has come a long way since its origins, when you needed such software to play DVDs on a Windows PC.