Review by A. H.

We installed this software on my daughter’s PC, which is running Windows 8.1. She has a 16:9 monitor, and the PowerDVD software allows her to watch DVDs and Blu-Ray discs on the machine. At first, playback was really choppy. I figured out that the software wasn’t syncing with the monitor’s 60hz refresh rate and located a setting that allowed me to change that. Overall, this software is quite functional and allows you to view video in a number of formats, including several HD formats.

And that brings me to my beef with this program. It altered nearly every media file-type association in the operating system to make itself the default program, ruining the balance between my daughter’s video editing, photo editing, and music playback software and requiring about ¹⁄₂ an hour to repair. Shame on Cyberlink for NOT EVEN GIVING THE USER AN OPTION NOT TO ALTER FILE ASSOCIATIONS DURING INSTALLATION. How hard can it be to give the user that option? Not at all. That makes this software user unfriendly – I’m tech savvy, but some people will have a heck of a time figuring out how to get their media files lined up the way they had them.

We haven’t used the cloud-based solution offered with this package yet. I’ll update this review when we do.

So, overall, this is like the Swiss Army knife of video playback software. My only real gripe–and it’s a major one–is that the programmers will hijack your media file associations without warning and provide you no option to set them manually to this program before they alter them.