 |
DVD deathmatch
By Holly Cunningham
(9/10/03)
Ten years ago your average personal computer only made differently toned beeping sounds and showed graphics as big, blocky pixels. Now, we use computers as entertainment centers, playing entire music collections and watching movies over the Internet and on DVD. But what DVD-player software do you use to get the best picture and flexibility out of your computer? We have two of our heavyweight favorites, InterVideo WinDVD Platinum 5 and CyberLink PowerDVD 5.0, suited up for battle for the coveted title of best DVD luchador and for a well-deserved slot on your hard-working machine.
Interface
Emulating handheld remotes, both of our prizefighters sport sleek little interfaces that give you all the button-control you need for immediate viewing gratification. And both of our pretty-boy champions have one-click auto-hide functions for controls and full-screen or letterboxed play modes. Skinnable PowerDVD has a handy dial control for rewind and fast-forward speeds in addition to the expected remote-style arrow buttons that both players offer. Although we loved the powerhouse slider-control Fast-Forward/Rewind combo that WinDVD roundhoused with, PowerDVD put its advanced DVD settings, such as Subtitle and Surround Sound, right on the main interface for easier use.
Functionality
The spectacular display capabilities of both of these big boys make movies look as good as your monitor can show them without any tweaking of the video settings. WinDVD boasts slightly better sound, but PowerDVD fared better visually with richer color and clearer frame-by-frame display in pause, fast-forward, and rewind modes. PowerDVDs lower CPU use let us switch easily between the movie and other tasks without the freeze/crash problems of WinDVD, letting us hunt for clues to DVD-hidden Easter eggs on the Internet and for actor bios on the Internet Movie Database.
Features
PowerDVD and WinDVD pack many extras into the ring for the truly movie-hungry. Both have excellent frame-capturing abilities, with PowerDVD letting you capture from full-screen mode without interruption and automatically saving to a clipboard or a file on a one-by-one basis. WinDVDs more powerful frame-capturing tools are only available in windowed mode, but they are more flexible, letting you nail up to six frames and saving them to a subsidiary window for later pasting, printing, saving to file, or e-mailing. WinDVD also dazzles with a multitude of visual effects to apply to your movie, such as Vintage, Abstract, Negative, and Cinema. WinDVD's useful time controls let you stretch or compress your movie-viewing to fit your schedule. PowerDVD fights back by offering support for, as it boasts, all rewritable DVD formats available on this planet, an important point if your movies come from more places than just major retail outlets.
Stability
Getting 30.1MB behemoth WinDVD into the ring requires Microsoft DirectX 8.1 or later installed on your system. Once youve cleared that hurdle, the installation runs smoothly, with the program auto-detecting drivers and components almost as quickly as its lighter-weight competitor. When running, WinDVD doesn't play well with others in the ring, freezing and ghosting when other memory-hungry programs compete for system resources. Bantamweight PowerDVD, at 10.1MB, makes movie-viewing pleasure more instantaneous. The program installs and runs hiccup-free in moments after auto-detecting and confirming system settings, and never glitches or crashes even with a multitude of other players in the ring.
Demo
For exhibition fighters, both of these powerhouse demos pack a wallop, but the WinDVD trial left its considerably more-constrained demo challenger lying on the mat when the movies got going. PowerDVDs 14-day demo only lets you watch 30 minutes of playback--and listen to five--before it cuts you off and makes you restart the program. Though competitor WinDVD has more in the way of registration annoyances and a nagging habit of trying to vault your firewall with calls home, the demo allows for unrestricted movie-viewing and playback for the duration of the two-week demo, without you hitting the Audio button wondering if youve suddenly gone deaf.
The winner
Oh, its a close one. If this were about the purchased product and not the restricted demo, it would have broken the other way, with leaner, meaner PowerDVD dancing its more beautiful and more stable self around the ring holding up the champions belt. But a demos all about a free ride, and a tease of five minutes--no matter how glorious--isnt going to win any prizes. The winner by technical decision is the WinDVD demo, with the watchword being demo.
Holly Cunningham, a frequent contributor to CNET, is a freelance Web designer working primarily to keep her Chihuahua in furs.
|
|
