If you watch movies on a laptop or on an LCD monitor, you may like to check out CyberLink PowerDVD 5 Deluxe ($69 ~ £41). The newest version introduces a technology called CyberLink Eagle Vision (CLEV) that will make you wonder how you ever watched movies on LCDs before. Even CRTs benefit to some degree.
CLEV analyzes decoded video on the fly to determine image areas that need enhanced contrast, brightness, and saturation. You have to see it to appreciate it, but the effect is like yanking a piece of dusty film off the monitor. Running CLEV in split-screen mode lets you see the impact.
As with the previous player interface, right-clicking on the image area brings up configuration options for video and audio enhancements. Another innovation, CyberLink PanoVision (CLPV), is similar to the black-bar eliminator technology found in high-end widescreen TVs. Rather than equally stretching all parts of a 4:3 aspect-ratio picture to fit the display of a widescreen laptop, which would distort the image, CLPV leaves most of the image untouched, stretching it logarithmically toward the edges. CLPV works equally well fitting a widescreen image (16:9) to a standard 4:3 screen.
We still like PowerDVD's leading-edge audio support. Every Dolby Surround mode is here, even EX 6.1/7.1 and the laptop-friendly Dolby Headphone. There's support for high-end DTS and 24-bit, 96-KHz output for sound cards that can handle it. CyberLink Multi-Channel Environment Impression (CLMEI) lets PowerDVD 5 intelligently play two-channel audio through a multichannel speaker system; you choose from one movie or two music modes. If you don't need the Deluxe version's DTS and Dolby Virtual Speaker support, you can download the $39 PowerDVD 5 Standard.
We are not as impressed with the audio time-stretch feature. In addition to letting you watch video at various speeds, this version of PowerDVD lets you hear somewhat intelligible dialogue while watching at 2X speed. Although, as promised, the pitches of sounds and voices do not change, words clip in awkward spots, making some dialogue difficult to understand. Shutting off all audio surround effects and leaving pure stereo helps somewhat, but this feature still needs work.
This minor complaint aside, PowerDVD 5 is a dazzling upgrade. As is the norm with new generations of software, PowerDVD 5 Deluxe requires some extra horsepower. Despite the claimed minimum requirements, you need a processor that runs at roughly 500-MHz to enjoy jitter-free images with CLEV enabled. Running CLEV with CLPV or CLMEI could up required CPU speed to around 1 GHz with at least 128MB of RAM. Download the trial version, install it on your machine and try the features you're interested in. But we can't slam PowerDVD 5 Deluxe for pushing progress. We can only praise it for bringing new life to the PC DVD experience.
Cyberlink website:
gocyberlink.com.
