CyberLink PowerDVD 12
A while ago I assembled myself a new PC in which I included a Blu-ray burner, so obviously I wanted to use the PC to play Blu-ray movies. The first thing I did was trying to find a freeware player that could play Blu-ray movies. I tried a couple, including VLC, but all of them had problems playing around 50% of my Blu-rays because they didn’t support the format on those discs. Next, I decided to look at commercial solutions and tried CyberLink PowerDVD 12. Installation on my Windows 8 Pro went without any problem. I tried all my Blu-rays and PowerDVD 12 happily played all of them without any issues. Image and sound quality for all Blu-ray discs I tested was great out-of-the-box. I played around with the settings and found a TrueTheater Surround audio option. After enabling it, audio sounded even better.
PowerDVD 12 supports a lot of different formats. Below is a list of the formats supported by PowerDVD 12 Ultra:
- Movies: BD-R 1.1/BD-RE 2.1, BD-R 2.0/BD-RE 3.0, BDROM 2.2, BD-J, BDROM Profile 1.1 (Bonus View), BDROM Profile 2.0 (BD-Live), BDROM Profile 5.0 (BD 3D), AVCREC, AVCHD, DVD-Video, DVD-VR, DVD+VR, VCPS, VCD, SVCD, CD
- Videos: 264, 26L, 3G2, 3GP, 3GP2, 3GPP, ASF, AVC, AVI, BSF, DAT, DIV, DIVX, DVR-MS, FLV, H264, JSV, JVT, M1V, M2P, M2T, M2TS, M2V, M4V, MK3D, MKV, MOD, MOV, MP4, MP4V, MPE, MPEG, MPG, MPV, MTS, MVC, QT, TIVO, TOD, TP, TPD, TRP, TS, TTS, VC1, VOB, VRO, WM, WMV, WTV**
- Photos: BMP, JPEG, JPG, PNG, TIF, TIFF, MPO, JPS, ARW, CR2, CRW, DCR, DNG, ERF, KDC, MEF, MRW, NEF, ORF, PEF, RAF, RAW, RW2, SR2, SRF, X3F
- Music: AAC, AC3, ADTS, AOB, DTS, FLAC, M4A, MID, MKA, MP2, MP3, MPA, OGG, RMI, WAV, WMA
PowerDVD 12 supports Blu-ray 3D, 4K video playback, and HDMI 1.4, and has optimization support for 3rd gen Intel Core processors, and GPU’s from both AMD and NVIDIA. Media can be enhanced in the following ways:
- TrueTheater HD – Upscale SD video to HD quality
- TrueTheater 3D – Watch 2D movies, videos and photo in 3D
- TrueTheater Motion – Up-converts the frame-rate for smoother video playback
- TrueTheater Lighting – Delivers superb colors and improves image detail
- TrueTheater Stabilizer – Minimize the shakiness of your videos
- TrueTheater Denoise – Removes blocky or pixilated effects
- TrueTheater Stretch – non-linear stretches your 4:3 video to 16:9ratio
CyberLink also has an App called “PowerDVD Remote” which allows you to control PowerDVD from your smartphone or tablet. It supports full navigation and playback for Blu-rays and DVD’s. It can also wirelessly play and save videos and photos from your smart device to your PC; turn you smart device into a wireless keyboard and mouse pad for your PC, and it supports multi-touch control to remotely rotate and zoom-in photos. Unfortunately, the App is currently only available on the Apple App Store and on the Android App Market. Since I have a Windows Phone, I was unable to test this functionality. I think the App is a great addition to PowerDVD, so I really hope they release a version for the Windows Phone.