While it’s not obliging of antiques, PowerDVD’s real value lies in its TrueTheater enhancements: HD upscaling, HDR color, lighting, motion compensation, noise reduction, and stabilization. The program is also a more than capable librarian and organizer with playlists, rankings, and the like. Some legacy (RealMedia) and oddball codecs (some FLV, and even some older AVC) that VLC handles easily won’t play, or play only as audio with PowerDVD. It also plays a very wide variety of the most popular video, audio, and image files, though it’s not quite as universal as the company has at times trumpeted. It still does that, as well as supporting new Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray movie discs if you have an HDCP-capable GPU. As you might suspect from the name, the program started life as a tool to play DVD movies (including copy-protected commercial titles) from a PC.

Legacy featuresīefore I get to the new stuff-a basic overview of what PowerDVD 20 does and what makes it better than the rest. But it could use some work in the dialogs and menus. CyberlinkĬyberlink’s PC interface is attractive and efficient with basic tasks.

And I’m being picky-you’ll adapt in short order. To be fair, most video player configuration dialog boxes and menus are even less efficient, while not being nearly as good-looking.

Cyberlink powerdirector 19 ultra review