Customer Reviews

PowerDVD 8 Deluxe [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've used PowerDVD for many years. It works quite well and supports the wide variety of media that I want to play. This new version is no exception. It supports formats like MPEG-4 AVC and DivX Pro, the HD detail is quite satisfying.



Audio-wise, PowerDVD works fine on 7.1 ch and 5.1 ch. No complaints.



The thing I like particularly is the feature called "Do It Smart" with which I can move subtitles and repeat dialogs.



As for the new "Remix" function. It might be fun but I don't find any time to try it yet.

I've been using PowerDVD since around version 2, and it's always worked quite nicely for DVDs. In fact, I'd say it's just about perfect. Blu-ray is another story, however.

When I first tried playing a Blu-ray, the program just shut down... no error message or anything. After checking out their support page, I downloaded and installed the latest patch (2217a as of this writing). Now I am able to play movies pretty smoothly under XP (w/SP3), but it's definitely rough around the edges.

I keep running into little glitches here and there, like shortcut keys not working at all (such as S for stop and spacebar for pause). Also, the auto reume feature, which works flawlessly on DVDs, only works when it wants to on Blu-rays (which is not very often). This means that if you ever press stop during a movie, when you press play again without shutting down the program, it starts at the beginning of the disc instead of resuming where it left off. Sometimes the menu screen won't come up when I want it to and once, while watching Incredible Hulk, I had to pause the movie for a few minutes. When I came back, the Universal 'screen saver' was on, so I pressed play again, but the player did nothing... completely locked up. I had to shut it down and restart it, which means I had to start over again from the beginning.

In a nutshell, this program gets 5 starts for DVD playback and 2 for Blu-ray, hence the reason why I'm giving it 3 stars. The Blu-ray playback is so glitchy that, even though the picture looks better, I'd still prefer to watch DVDs, since Blu-ray is just a hassle to deal with using this program.

Note: I also tried WinDVD v9, which didn't work at all for me. I am not aware of any other alternatives.

I was hesitant about installing Power DVD after seeing the CPU speed requirements of 2.4 GHz for winXP. My unit is 2.0 GHz and I found the program to work flawlessly. I then tried it on my laptop which is 1.8 GHz, also winXP, and also had the same results, no problems at all. I do not do Blueray, so I can't comment on that aspect, but for what I do it works just fine, and have found that it plays a lot of content that Windows Media Player just can't play.PowerDirector 8 Deluxe

This is easy to use and has worked for all of the videos I have tried so far.