CyberLink PowerDVD Editor's Review

Watch video on your advanced, ultra HD display with this must have Windows media player

I love watching movies.  In fact, I watch movies more than I watch regular, network TV here in the States. I have a real issue with mainstream television. I am not fond of the writing, I don’t like many of the plot lines, and most of it isn’t appropriate for family viewing. I have cable TV and most of the movie channels because I REALLY don’t like network TV. However, when I can’t watch my movie channels due to travel, business commute or other issues, I really like to take my video on the go and its important to have a really good Windows DVD app like CyberLink’s PowerDVD Ultra at times like those. Its one of my favorites.

PowerDVD Ultra supports all media types including video, audio and photographic content.  Its your all-purpose entertainment station. With it, you can enjoy media on your PC, mobile devices, home networks, from the cloud, and even via social networks. PowerDVD Ultra’s enhanced audio-visual quality, extended file format support, improved functionality, refinements to the user interface, and has an enhanced, wide range of digital media experiences.

PowerDVD takes your movie experience to new places with playback enhancements and format support additions you won’t find in any other player.  The app intelligently analyzes video footage and optimizes hues and vibrancy, creating a true-to-life viewing experience. TrueTheater Color recognizes skin tones in footage and applies only subtle adjustments to these areas in order to achieve improvements while retaining authentic coloring.

PowerDVD's intelligent media buffering engine means that you no longer have to deal with stop and start playback, especially when you're streaming video from a NAS device. This is a huge advancement, as streaming video on your home network just got more reliable.  Advanced preloading techniques let PowerDVD analyze and retrieve additional playback data so that your media playback is not interrupted, even if the connection to your storage device is degraded.

App Pro’s: 20GB free cloud storage, 4K Video support, play from ISO's

App Con’s: Expensive, non-standard interface

Conclusion: PowerDVD Ultra is one of the better DVD players on the market. Its easy to use, has advanced playback and streaming controls and, it also supports 4K video... if you can find video files that actually support the new color and resolution format. When PowerDVD detects a 4K video file and a 4K monitor, Overlay Mode is automatically engaged to optimize the rendering pipeline and reduce the graphic resource load, delivering smooth, lag-free playback.

The app is also simply gorgeous to look at. However, non-standard UI's are always an issue with Windows.  They're more often than not, "coats of paint," or masks, over the standard Windows UI and take resources away from the PC, generating performance issues. I didn't see that here with PowerDVD, and I tested it on an older, Windows 7 based PC.

If you’ve ripped your DVD’s to ISO’s, PowerDVD now offers convenient direct playback of Blu-ray and DVD ISO files, either directly from the PC or via a network-connected drive. No additional mounting tools are required; and if your playback is interrupted, you don’t have to worry about trying to remember where you were in the movie.  PowerDVD can pick it up right where you left off.

This is a really cool application, and since Microsoft has done a huge amount of work to deemphasize Windows Media Player (and I'm not entirely certain why), a more modern app with support for newer HD formats and technology is clearly needed. PowerDVD is filling a huge hole, and it does a GREAT job at it, too.