Review by SevereWX

This is a very nice media player. It plays back various media sources with complete stability. The user interface is very simple and easy to operate, the controls are intuitive, and it pretty much is impossible to screw anything up.

Playback video quality seems to be excellent. At 1080p resolution I haven’t noticed any quality difference from that of other media suites. The pictures are clear, crisp, and the colors are what you’d expect them to be.

Audio playback was less than stellar at default setting. By default, the audio decoding is handled by PowerDVD and frankly, when sending audio to my AVR via HDMI, it did a horrible job of separating the audio channels. The center channel was practically ignored and audio was sent to the front left and right channels instead. To fix this issue, I went into the audio settings and set PowerDVD to send non-decoded audio to my AVR instead of letting PowerDVD decode it. This way, my AVR was able to properly decode the HDMI audio signals and send them to the proper speakers. Audio sounded perfect after that.

First run of this program was less than confidence inspiring. As it worked to build the media library, which took nearly 8 hours to complete, the PowerDVD program would become unresponsive and freeze up extended periods. Once the media library had been built, the program has run smoothly and stably since.

Overall I’m very happy with this suite, and it does a better job than Windows Media Center for Windows 8.1 Pro, which tends to be buggy and not want to play various media sources without computer restarts and other nonsense. PowerDVD just plays everything without hassle.