Customer Reviews

PowerDVD 8 Standard [OLD VERSION]

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

 

 

having problems getting it to play dvd,i have tried over and over again, no luck.

PowerDVD 8 works fine for home theater PC's utilizing either WinXP MCE 2005 or Vista Home Premium. Simply install PowerDVD and let Windows Media Center handle the rest. I have ripped all 700 of my dvd's to a 6tb hard drive array and I can use Media Center to play back any movie / concert with just a few simple button clicks from my MCE remote.

I don't really use any of the additional features of PowerDVD 8. I find most of the "extra features" to be nothing more than annoying fluff. Just like Windows fluff-ware, I just deactivate it during my inital setup of PowerDVD. I also can't vouch for the changes between earlier versions of PowerDVD and version 8. My previous version of PowerDVD is from 2001, and is thus utterly uncomparable.

I do dock one star for the excessive bloat-ware such as Movie Mix and Moovie Live. These are utterly useless for Home Theater PC use. Also, the application can be initially tricky for the less computer savvy to set up. Make sure that you don't need Blu-Ray support and that you'll be using the digital outputs of your computer to hook up to a Receiver or Preamp-Processor to do the sound decoding.

Other than that, PowerDVD works exactly as needed with Windows Media Center. When properly configured, you'll never see PowerDVD as the integration with Media Center is seamless and flawless.

I like the overall picture quality of Power DVD 8. But I found DVD 5 had much easier player and screen controls. Also DVD 5 was much friendly to use when resizing the picture and when moving the picture around on the LCD or CRT screen.

I love this product. The things I especially like about it is the quality of the DVD playback. It upconverts the DVDs to a great quality. I also love that it remembers where I was in the DVD even if I remove the DVD and reinsert it. No more searching to figure out where I left off. I have to admit that I haven't had a chance yet to use any of the online features but am looking forward to checking them out when I get a chance.

i purchased this after reading about interesting new features on the cyberlink web site, but after installing it I became annoyed when I found it it would not play 25% of the content the copy of poweDVD5 I had already been quite happy using. newer is NOT always better. cyberlink has managed to ruin a perfectly good product, which worked very well in versions 4, 5 and 6. do yourself a favor and avoid version 8 like a disease