Hyper-Threading Technology Support.
WinDVD 5 is optimized to make use of H-T for improved
performance, if you have a capable CPU of course.
MyPlayback. WinDVD allows you to
create playlists with audio tracks or video files from
DVDs, VCDs, SVCDs & CDs. Additionally you create
playback bookmarks that can be exported.
Multiple Screen Capture Options.
Screen capture features have received an overhaul in WinDVD
5. Apart from now being able to specify the location of the
Capture directory, it’s now also possible to save images in
JPEG or Bitmap formats, save as desktop wallpaper, email an
image, or delete captures.
A save image to clipboard option
isn’t included however (which I believe PowerDVD includes),
which would be useful. You can also set whether the
Capture window should be opened or not upon capturing an
image.
Viewing Optimizer. In WinDVD’s
Color subpanel presets are included for CRT (Monitor),
LCD, TV & Projector, which adjusts the Brightness, Contrast,
Color, Hue & Gamma levels accordingly.
These viewing presets actually worked
surprisingly well in my testing, I didn’t find myself
needing to go and re-adjust settings to improve visuals. If
you’re not happy with these you can always adjust them
settings yourself as well.
QualiView: WinDVD 5 Platinum
provides Progressive Deinterlacing support, which is
capable of converting 60 interlaced fields into 60
progressive frames, doubling the video data rate for
smoother DVD playback. This can be of true benefit if
you actually own any interlaced video content, in which case
it can noticeably improve image quality of such content on
progressive display devices, e.g. Monitors.
To get a good idea of what the
difference can mean I took 2 screenshots with an interlaced
DVD (Tae-Bo II: Get Ripped if you must know):
Force Weave
Progressive
Clearly progressive deinterlacing offers
a nicer image in this case, with the larger your progressive
display being the more noticeable these effects will be. The
deinterlacing method to be used by WinDVD can be set in the
Display subpanel.
Movie Encyclopedia. Perhaps the
most useless new feature available is the
Movie
Encyclopedia, which rather than sensibly linking
to
IMDB,
instead uses InterVideo’s own database, which was pretty
much empty by the time of writing this review. As the
InterVideo website somewhat laughably puts it – “There are
thousands of DVD title out there, so if you're one of
the lucky people who watches a DVD that is not in our
database, you'll be invited to enter in the information and
what you submit will become part of our database”. Well
regardless of popularity or obscurity pretty much every DVD
I tried checking out with the Encyclopedia greeted me with
the following screen.
I looked for different titles including
X-Men 2, Gangs of New York, The Two Towers or Equilibrium;
no-one seems to have submitted anything yet and with the
existence of
IMDB
there seems little point in doing so anyway, a highly
comprehensive source already exists.
Out of boredom I decided to use the
Search feature looking for ‘Steven Spielberg’ which did
actually return several entries (Amistad, Saving Private
Ryan, Saving Private Ryan (yes, twice), The Color Purple,
1941, Always, Amistad, Jaws & Always (Again, twice). Out of
curiosity I looked up Saving Private Ryan which returned the
following information:
Saving Private Ryan
Run Time: 169.0
minutes
Year Published: 1998
Genre: Drama
MPAA Rating: R
Search for information about Saving Private Ryan on
Google
Search for
easter eggs
in the Saving Private Ryan
Other movies directed by Steven Spielberg or other
movies starring:
· Tom Hanks
· Edward Burns
· Tom Sizemore
· Jeremy
Davies
· Vin Diesel
· Adam
Goldberg
· Barry Pepper
· Giovanni
Ribisi
· Matt Damon
· Dennis
Farina
· Ted Danson
· Harve
Presnell
As you can see, nothing particularly
interesting here (The easter egg link even just points you
to a Google search, & Saving Private Ryan a Drama?!). Now
compare the above to
here, spot the differences? Similarly
clicking on, say, Vin Diesel ran a search on InterVideo’s
database for films starring him, again, fairly limited in
results, e.g. No XXX or The Fast & The Furious. Personally I
feel InterVideo should either remove this “feature” or a
link to IMDB if at all possible as it’s currently
essentially useless & what little is up is still severely
lacking.
PAL TruSpeed. PAL DVDs invariably
run 4%
faster than NTSC DVDs. This means that both video
and audio play slightly faster. WinDVD offers the (patent
pending) ability to reduce the playback speed of PAL DVDs
(Which would normally play at 25 frames per second, back to
24 frames per second) to eliminate this video/audio speedup.
As far as I’m aware no other software DVD decoder offers
this capability and is certainly a welcome one.
Mobile Technology Pack. Those of
you using laptops will be pleased to see that WinDVD now
includes mobile optimizations which are designed to greatly
reduce battery usage. I wasn’t able to test these out
though.
