Review by M Cox

There is a feature option in this version that is new to me. After installation, you are asked if you want to enter the PC version or the Television version without any explanation of what each offers. I chose the TV mode and right away I didn’t like the menu structure. For some very weird reason, the title bar at the bottom is very wide and actually covers up a big portion of the movie menu such as subtitles. You just cannot select the subtitles on most movies I have watched so far. It almost seems like PowerDVD has dropped back to VGA resolution on my 65 inch Panasonic HDTV. And I cannot seem to shrink that ultra wide black bar at the bottom that has the play, stop, pause, etc symbols. On some movies I’ve seen so far, I can use that big black menu to select the subtitles, but most often not. I just cannot imagine why they created such a huge black menu bar at the bottom of the screen. Now the black bar goes away after you start watching the move. I have had cases where I got stuck in a menu loop and had to start the movie from the beginning. So I thought maybe it was unique to the computer I had connected to the Panasonic HDTV.

So I installed PowerDVD 16 on my best computer that has a new $475 NVidia card inside and it is connected to an $800 40 inch UHD computer monitor. But this time I selected the PC mode and the menu bar at the bottom was acceptable. Then I switched to the TV mode and there was that broad black line again. It was a little more narrow than on my 65 inch Pansonic HDTV, but not by much. I still had the same issues trying to activate the menu in the bottom on the Movie menu image - that is selecting the language and subtitles.

I don’t know what Cyberlink was thinking to create this monstrous thick black title bar that covers up the bottom part of the movie startup menu. I have almost every release of PowerDVD there is and this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this. I will have to uninstall version 16 and go back to version 15. I hope they come out with a new tweak to fix the huge black bar at the bottom of the screen or at least give me the option of selecting how big it is.

Back to the PC and TV modes for a moment, they offer some imaging enhancement that is supposed to allow the viewer to view in original content, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% enhancement. I tried to see the difference between these five settings and neither my wife nor I could detect even the slightest difference in any of these optional settings. It wasn’t until I installed this new release on my computer with a UHD monitor and even then it was subtle. Basically, it gives you the choice of several levels of sharpness. So setting it to 0% (original) just passes the video as it was recorded. If you skip to the end of the movie when the credits start to scroll, you can finally see a little difference between 0% and 100%. The lettering is a little more crisp when at the 100% setting. At the lower settings, the lettering looks slightly soft or very slightly blurring or maybe out of focus for lack of more descriptive terms. But when watching the movie, I just couldn’t notice the difference even on the $800 40 inch UHD monitor and $375 NVidia video card. My wife has ²⁰⁄₁₅ vision courtesy of Lasik surgery and she couldn’t see any difference either except for the rolling credits at the end of the movie. Her eyesight is near perfect and much better than mine. So yes, it makes the image a little crisper on a UHD television, but don’t expect miracles.

The second option has to do with audio quality and has the same range of 0% to 100% enhancement. I have a very high quality Klipsch 7.1 sound system and I really enjoy it. But here again, neither my 27 year old wife nor I could detect any difference in sound enhancement. She can hear far better than I can. There’s probably some improvement, but without the ability to instantly switch between two entirely different sound systems in an AB comparison, I don’t think it is possible to hear any difference no matter how good your hearing is.

Now I don’t want to be seen as overly critical. Thats not my intent. Just moderate your expectations and don’t expect miraculous improvements in the video and sound quality. There are definitely some video improvements just subtle. Obviously any enhancements are welcome. I it isn’t a simple task to make these video adjustments in real time. And you cant create something out of nothing.

I just recently upgraded to Windows 10 and from what I can determine, Microsoft didn’t include any video players in the operating system. So it appears you will have to purchase an application like PowerDVD if you plan to watch movies via your computer. There are some fairly good free movie players and I have used two of these apps. One is called VLC and another one is called MPC-HC. VLC is fairly popular, but I think MPC-HC is a little better, but not huge amount. If you just want a casual computer based movie player, the free players are not bad pretty good in fact. You won’t get a lot of frills, but they certainly do the job. There were a couple of instances where I couldn’t get PowerDVD to play a movie ripped to my hard drive. PowerDVD is apparently a lot more legal than some players when it comes to hard drive copies of movies. I have a large collection of legal DVDs and Blu-ray movies in ISO format backed up on several high capacity disks.

That reminds me of a new feature on this release of PowerDVD it will now play a ISO movie file. But it takes it quite a lot of time to buffer the movie in memory before you are able to play the movie. If you use the free app called Virtual CloneDrive to play the ISO image with PowerDVD, it loads far faster than PowerDVD. So I still have to mount the movies ISO file using Virtual Clone. And that will automatically invoke PowerDVD to play the movie file. It is a little annoying to unmount a movie file, but it will release the movie when you select the next movie you want to watch. You can find the free Virtual Clone Drive app at the RedFox website along with some other interesting apps. It used to be called SlySoft, but recently Slysoft mysteriously vanished overnight. Dont download any recent updates to the Slysoft apps if you purchased a license or youll have to pay for it again.

My wife is not a native English speaker, so it helps her to see what is being said. And a lot of times, the sound recordings in movies is virtually inaudible and impossible to understand what the actors are saying. So even though the subtitles are annoying, I place more value on knowing what the actors are saying.

If you don’t think my review is useful, tell me the reason why in the comments so I can improve my review writing skills.