The Cyberlink folks have finally made PowerDVD nearly the equal of Microsoft’s Windows Media Player and Apple’s QuickTime player for augmenting music playback. It’s like turning up the saturation control in other players, but it’s smarter in that it leaves skin tones alone, so there’s no spray-tan effect. The biggest add for version 15 of PowerDVD is some very tasteful color enhancement, called, of course, TrueTheater Color. PowerDVD made even this high bit-rate, 1080 copy of The Incredibles look sharper and more vivid. There’s even after-the-fact video stabilization for home movies. The effect on older movies and animated movies is startling-and to be honest-addictive. PowerDVD 15 renders movies better than anything else available, and does so without the fuss other players require on the user’s part, such as loading shaders (FX), tweaking contrast and saturation, and so on. I’m being picky, but as I’ve already mentioned, there are other less-than-intuitively placed options, too.

For instance, there’s a main heading that says “playlists,” but those are only for music files. The PowerDVD librarian is easy to use and offers a battery of cataloging features, but it’s a quirky in spots. To that end, Cyberlink provides both remote-control and playback apps for both Android and iOS. PowerDVD also features a “cinema mode”, aka a 10-foot interface i.e., an interface that can be controlled with a remote control from a distance. In PowerDVD 14, this proceeded with reckless abandon, sometimes choking your system. On the other hand, Cyberlink has backed off on the automatic cataloging of files.

Cyberlink 15