WinDVD 5 Platinum review @ TechSpot

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.

http://www.techspot.com/reviews/software/windvd5/box.gif

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 (http://www.techspot.com/reviews/software/windvd5/), Intervideo’s flagship product.

Nice.

Maybe it's time to upgrade from 3.1 soon...
The price is a bit high though coming in at 69.95$. Especially when I got the current version for free with my motherboard :)

WinDVD6 is out.

http://www.intervideo.com/jsp/WinDVDPlatinum_Profile.jsp

At the time I wrote this review WinDVD 6 was unavailable.

From the article itself: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).

And now that I've had time to read it, a good read :)

Just one thing I felt was missing (but that might lack of feature) was a mention if WinDVD let the disk spin down if you paused the movie for a while, and how it handled this when you continue playing...

Just watched DreamCatcher at a friends, and we had a little break in the middle of the film (toilet, smoke and more candy) and when we started the film again it played the 2 sec it had cached and then stuttered until it had spun back to speed, meaning we missed a couple of seconds with conversation (not that it really mattered in this film, but still).

So what I'm curious about is,
does WinDVD stop the drive from spinning down? or
does it halt playback until the drive has spun back up and it has cached more than 2 sec (so we'll get a fluid playback)?