PowerDVD, you’re dead to me
Like Nero, PowerDVD is one of those applications you see bundled with nearly all (non-OEM) DVD drives these days. And again, like Nero, it has now become an obsolete application to me. And if it’s not bundled with a DVD drive, it’s bundled with a graphics card. Or if the motherboard has sufficient graphic prowess itself, it may even be bundled with the motherboard!
Nero’s downfall was because it became too bloated. I didn’t want to have to install a 1 gigabyte program to burn files to a discs or the occasional ISO, so ISORecorder and Vista’s DVD burner have replaced them – free. One could argue that Nero was just trying to stay relevant by adding in features it perceived its users wanted, and I’m sure some users do make use of it, but I don’t really see the need for video, audio and photo editing bundled with my CD/DVD burning software.
PowerDVD’s downfall is seemingly by their own design. In the “old” PowerDVD 7 Ultra, both HD-DVD and Bluray playback is present. It works perfectly fine for my usage, except for two things.
- The first problem, it doesn’t integrate into Windows Media Center, with the best way to do so is a script to launch the application when HD/BD discs are detected.
- The second is that subtitles on many of my HD-DVDs are permanently on. They’re not encoded into the main stream (as I can switch between subtitle languages fine), but PowerDVD won’t disable them.
So, I thought upgrading to PowerDVD 8 Ultra would be the way to go. Unfortunately Cyberlink has decided that since Toshiba has dropped HD-DVD support, they would too. PowerDVD 8 Ultra no longer plays back HD-DVD.
“No HD-DVD playback? Fine. I’ll go build my own HD-DVD player with blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the HD-DVD player and the blackjack. Eh, screw the whole thing.”
I’m considering building my own MCML based plugin (so it can, potentially, stream across to Media Centre Extenders), using DirectShow Graphs and AVISynth to patch it in. Initial tests are looking good, I just need to figure out MCML a bit better first ;)