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PowerDVD 14 Ultra $100.00

Support for Blu-ray, 3D, Ultraviolet, 4K and h.265 make PowerDVD the closest thing to an all-encompassing multimedia center you'll find. But it's still a few features short.

Tired of constantly switching between iTunes, Windows Media Player, VLC, and other programs for different media tasks? I am. Cyberlinks PowerDVD, with its support for Blu-ray and 4K as well as most other types of video, audio, and images has the potential to be that all-in-one media solution weve been searching for. The latest iteration, PowerDVD 14, is close but no cigar due to some missing basics. However, the addition of support for up-and-coming technologies such as h.265 and the UltraViolet media delivery system make it a uniquely powerful player.

PowerDVD 14, which runs on Windows PCs, comes in three flavorsthe $50 Standard version, which handles DVD and HD files; the $80 Pro, which adds Blu-ray and 4K support; and the $100 Ultra which throws in 3D and the companys Power Media Player app for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. All three versions include PowerDVD Remote for iOS and Android which allows you to use your mobile devices asyou guessed ita remote control for PowerDVD.

In terms of what you see on the screen, PowerDVD 14 is the best Blu-ray/DVD/video player out there. Normal playback includes hardware acceleration, but theres also a CPU mode with TrueTheater enhancements which will make a lot of materialprimarily DVDslook more high-def. The interface is handsome and well thought out, with the notably unintuitive exception of having to click on the fast forward icon to slow down a video. Theres also a ten-foot interface for use from your couch with the aforementioned remote software.

PowerDVDs 10-foot interface is much like Windows Media Centers.

My initial encounters with PowerDVD 14 were frustrating, due to the way it handled background tasks such as media collection and network path scouting. A pre-release update mostly fixed this; however, I still ran into instances where the program would seem to hang, especially at first run. The only other issues I ran into were the inability to drag files from an archive directly to PowerDVD (VLC can handle this), and just the audio portion of certain FLV videos being played.

In my other codec support tests, PowerDVD 14 played AVI/PCM, DivX 5, DivX HD, MPEG 1/2/4, Xvid, most FLV, Quicktime, AVCHD, WMV, h.264, and OGG Theora. Audio track support includes AAC and 5.1 Dolby Digital. PowerDVD 14 now also supports HEVC, the High Efficiency Video Codecmore on that in a bit.

In my music tests, PowerDVD 14 played 5.1 surround, FLAC, WMA, MP3, OGG Vorbis, APE, lossless WMA, Apple lossless (new), M4A, and all types of wave files up to 96kHz/32-bits (the max my system supports). PowerDVD also supports JPEG, BMP, TIFF (compressed and uncompressed), and PNG photos, and it offers some nice fades when you play a group as a slideshow. The photo browser is top-notch and presents your images in calendar style according to the data taken. Alas, theres no tag editing for photos or music files.

PowerDVD lets you browse your photos by calendar date. It also supports a wide variety of music files.

Link:
Cyberlink PowerDVD 14 review: Media playback app has what you need -- almost