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For a long
time, not only have software DVD players replaced its
hardware-decoding counterparts, but two major products have
nearly taken over the whole PC market offering the best and
most complete solutions for the DVD aficionado.
These two products we are talking about
are Cyberlink’s PowerDVD and Intervideo’s WinDVD, both of
which have proven to be rich, very often updated solutions,
especially in the audio decoding part. Today we are taking a
close look to WinDVD 5 Platinum, Intervideo’s flagship
product.
WinDVD alone has had a long way since
its first versions so you may be asking yourself what’s new
in 5.0 and what’s Platinum all about, after all if you have
bought any mid to high-end video/audio hardware product in
the last few months there is a good chance you got some
version of WinDVD bundled with it.
Note: By the
time of posting this review, InterVideo went on and
released a new version of WinDVD Platinum (6.0).
According to what we were told, more than a
revolutionary this is more of evolutionary release and
most of the information posted here remains valid at
least for current new generation of the player (we
tested version 5.3 with Audio Booster Pack).
WinDVD 5 offers a well polished
interface, managing to be comprehensive while retaining ease
of use and an uncluttered screen. This is mainly thanks to
the use of Sub-panels attached to the player window, as in
the screenshot below.
These cover everything from
Navigation to Time Stretching and can be viewed
or hidden at will. Other options are available should you
right click on the video window. WinDVD also may operate in
docked/undocked modes, meaning that you can dock the player
to the player window, as can other available windows, here’s
the fully docked display:
Right clicking on the display window
also offers access to a lot of features, in most cases it’s
probably even quicker to use than the main player is.
WinDVD 5 Platinum introduces several new
features to WinDVD, some of which include:
Smart Stretch. Smart Stretch
is a new feature that lets you customize your viewing image
by intelligently compensating for the differences in
displays & aspect ratios. This non-linear technology
minimizes the distortion by only stretching the edges of the
video & maintaining the original content in the center
portion of the image. Now you can watch your videos with the
correct aspect ration regardless of the movie or your
display device.
Video Collage. WinDVD now offers
several video effects that can be applied to the image in
the Video Effect subpanel, though not entirely new,
WinDVD 5 adds to ability to use multiple effects
simultaneously.
Multiple effects can be applied, with
the Intensity & Variation of each adjustable
via 2 sliders. The effect can also be previewed in
Half-screen before applying them to the Full-screen. These
are somewhat akin to the SmartShader effects available with
newer ATI Radeon Graphics cards, albeit some are actually
useful. To test these out I took several before & after
shots in Equilibrium, X-Men 2 and Hulk with difference
effects:
X-Men 2 original
shot |
X-Men 2 using
Cinema Enhancement effects |
Hulk The Movie
original shot |
Hulk using Movie
effects |
Equilibrium
original shot |
Equilibrium using
Sharpness & Movie effects |
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(click to enlarge) |
As you can see some of these effects can
offer some decent image quality enhancement. That said,
these wouldn’t work in conjunction with Hardware
Color/Decode Acceleration with pre 4.3 Catalyst Drivers,
so you might possibly experience a few performance hitches
by using these, depending on your PC specs.
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