Product Reviews

Every PC you can buy these days has a DVD drive and most come with some sort of playback software. So what do you get if you shell out £40 for CyberLink's new PowerDVD 7 Deluxe? The answer, on paper, is an impressive selection of new features.

Power DVD 7 Deluxe supports many of the latest video and audio formats, notably high-definition (HD) video. It handles HD WMV files and MPEG4, known as H.264, which produces high-quality video at lower bit rates than standard MPEG2. In practice, we've yet to see UK commercial releases that use H.264. If you want support for HD-DVD or Blu-ray, the two high-capacity DVD formats set to battle it out for the public's attention, you must invest in one of the extra enthusiast packs that CyberLink has planned for later in the year.

Even if it isn't kitted out for the future yet, there's plenty in PowerDVD 7 to make movie watching a more pleasant experience. A few audio tweaks allow you to make the best of tinny notebook speakers. Three new surround-sound formats - DTS-ES Matrix and Discrete, DTS 96/24, and DTS Neo:6 - are provided as well, but these will appeal only to hardened home cinema buffs, and many DVD movies

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don't offer these types of soundtrack as an option.

There's more to shout about on the video front, with support for the PureVideo and Avivo hardware enhancements built into Nvidia and ATI's latest graphics card. PowerDVD 7's CLEV-2 image-enhancing technology adjusts brightness automatically as the film is playing to reveal more detail. It works well, though the default settings were a little heavy-handed, giving gloomier scenes a Wizard of Oz-type makeover. This can be toned down with CLEV-2's manual option.

The features most likely to persuade you to pay £40 for the new version of PowerDVD are those designed for notebook users. The program's Mobile Power Settings allow you to sacrifice some quality to extend your battery life if you're watching videos on a notebook. The handy onscreen battery life indicator enables you to keep an eye on how much time you have left. Better still, the new See It All feature can keep tabs on how much power is left, and increase the speed of playback so you can catch the closing credits before your notebook dies. At its fastest setting of 1.25x normal speed, the increase is perceptible and a little comical; still, with many notebooks lasting little more than an hour-and-a-half when playing DVDs, it could save you a lot of frustration.

If you're a rampant DVD movie fan or have keen enough hearing to appreciate the merits of DVD Audio, £40 is a fair price to pay for a player that can take advantage of a massive LCD screen and 7.1 speakers. If you can't get through a train journey without treating fellow passengers to an impromptu cinema show on your notebook, its mobile features will be a godsend. But for those at home who already own DVD playback software, there's no reason to upgrade.