Marc Gregoire’s Blog

Cyberlink PowerDVD was one of the first DVD players on the market and is still considered by many to be one of the best. The latest version is version 7 which I’m reviewing today. Installation went smooth on both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Most people cannot be bothered to spend money on a DVD player because most of them are happy with the DVD player software that they got when they bought their PC. However, once you have used PowerDVD 7 you simply do not want to go back anymore. PowerDVD offers so much more. The deinterlacing quality of PowerDVD is much better than you get with most of those pre-installed DVD players. On top of that, the latest version adds support for high definition formats like MPEG-4 H.264 and WMV-HD and supports a wide range of audio formats like DTS 5.1, Dolby Pro Logic IIx, DTS-ES Discrete and more. Unfortunatly if you want to experience DTS-ES Discrete, DTS Neo:6 or SRS TruSurround XT you will need to buy the advanced audio pack. However, even though version 7 supports the high definition video formats, it does not support playing movies directly from Blu-ray or HD-DVD discs. For this you need PowerDVD 7 Ultra.

The Say-It-Again option allows you to quickly jump back a few seconds in case you missed something. The Read-It-Clearly feature allows you to change the position of subtitles. For notebook users, an interesting feature is the See-It-All feature. This monitors the battery level of your notbook and will automatically speed up the movie to make sure you can see the entire movie before your battery runs out. Any speed increase between 1% and 20% is actually not bothering anything.

The default interface of PowerDVD 7 looks pretty clean and modern as can be seen on the screenshot. In my opinion the new GUI is better than the previous versions.

The price might seem a bit high but you get a very good and complete DVD playback solution supporting the latest in video and audio formats.

I finally found some time to post some pictures of my holiday to Brasil Click a picture to get a larger version. Move your mouse over a picture to get a very brief description-balloon. (Note: all pictures are copyrighted by me, Marc Gregoire. Please contact me if you want to use one.) Read the rest of this entry »

After a long development cycle and 2 beta phases, today I can proudly announce that Wallpaper Cycler 3.5.0.97 has gone gold.
Wallpaper Cycler 3.5.0.97 has a lot of new features and bug-fixes. Some of the major new features include:

• Tag support: assign tags to wallpapers, layouts and/or categories.
• Search Folders to get a different view on your wallpapers.
• Smart Orientation for portrait/landscape monitors.
• Faster thumbnail generation.
• Installation possible without being administrator.
• Wizard to guide you with certain actions.
• Windows Vista Gadget to control Wallpaper Cycler.
• “Quick Disable” hotkeys to quickly disable categories/tags.
• Slideshow Mode.
• Statistics.
• …

Learn more about Wallpaper Cycler 3.5.0.97.

I made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• The thumbnail file is not kept open all the time anymore, so backup software shouldn’t have problems with it.
• Sometimes the folder synchronization feature kicked in while rebuilding the thumbs database with the thumbnail manager.
• Folder synchronization doesn’t get stuck anymore in a loop when the WCL was saved in one of the folders that was being monitored for changes.

I’m also finalizing the Help File and the new Online Help Site and preparing for a release very soon now…

I made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• Black dot appearing in corners sometimes when using small corner rounding values for wallpaper objects with a border of a few pixels.

Also, Beta 2 of Wallpaper Cycler 3.5 is finished and is currently being beta tested by a closed group of beta-testers.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• Updated AGG to 2.4.
• You can now configure the CPU monitoring threshold between 0% and 100%.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• A message is shown when cpu monitoring/time synchronization was enabled and is being disabled because you are not an administrator anymore.
• The “Day With Note Cell” configuration in the layout calendar settings now properly inherits the values from the “cells” configuration.
• In the calendar notes editor, when you edit something, close it and save & close the layout editor, the calendar notes object on the desktop is not clickable anymore. Double-clicking doesn’t do anything until the next cycle.
• Time Synchronization requires administrative privileges. Now Wallpaper Cycler will check if it has administrative privileges and if not will automatically disable all time synchronization settings. Works also with Vista UAC. + added extra note in help file to describe this.
• CPU Monitoring requires administrative privileges. Now Wallpaper Cycler will check if it has administrative privileges and if not will automatically disable all CPU Monitoring settings. Works also with Vista UAC. + added extra note in help file to describe this.
• Wallpaper Cycler would lose all its “Skip Extensions” and “Most Recent Used” items during a crash report generation.