Hero DVD Player

This DVD-player software provides adequate playback controls, some interesting skins, and screen-capture capability, but it doesn't really beat the competition. Due to some translation difficulties, the installation is a bit mysterious. We went with the defaults and everything worked fine. The default skin is sleek and includes a button that lets you cycle through all the skins available, although we don't consider skin support all that important for this type of software. Hero DVD Player includes a number of features for fine-tuning picture and audio quality, and makes many of them easily accessible on the interface, including the luminance and chrominance slider controls--and you can get lost in all the options in the configuration menus. We liked that the program lets you take screen grabs from video. By default, the running time displays in the upper-right corner of the video, but it can easily be turned off. Unlike some other DVD players, Hero's fast-forwarding mutes audio. Also, we found no menu button in the interface, a serious oversight. More technical videophiles will like the range of control Hero gives you over how video displays, but many of the program's features will be lost on casual users.