First a big thank you to Cyberlink for providing PowerDVD 6.0 Deluxe for this Review.

Recently I had the chance to look at the new PowerDVD 6.0 and like the previous versions of the software I think overall its a pretty good replacement for the Windows media player that has in my view gotten worse over the years and not better.

The install of the software went smoothly and there isn’t much to say about that other then during the install you can select what type of skin you want PowerDVD to load up by default and thats about the only thing you have to mess with. For those that don’t know what a skin is, it refers to the look of the player and you have several skins to change the look of the player that you can select from. You can also change these skins after the install if you look into the options that are in the player.

What I have always liked about PowerDVD over the windows media player is the fact that you can Fast Forward and Rewind at varying speeds and still see the video as you do this. You also have a Navigation slider that you can click on and Navigate that way.

PowerDVD supports the following formats for media..

DivX, DVD(MPEG-2), DVD+VR, DVD-VR, DVD-Audio, VCD(MPEG-1), SVCD, MiniDVD and DVD files on the hard drive (HDD) playback.

You can also use PowerDVD to play back your audio cd’s or even your mp3 files.

For those wondering PowerDVD supports a lot of different audio options from multi-speaker surround sound all the way down to head phones. You also have access to equalizer settings for the sound as well. One thing I didn’t like was the fact you only had a small amount of equalizer settings to choose from and I didn’t see a way to bring up a equalizer and set things the way I want them instead of the presets. In addition to the Equalizer you also have access to some sound processing routines that will give you a virtual surround sound from headphones or speakers. I tried this Virtual Surround sound out with some headphones and it made some of my DVD’s sound pretty good.

Overall the video quality seemed good to me as well and again this program has a lot of options you can tinker with in terms of video settings. While speaking of the video settings you can setup Bookmarks for your video files as well so that you can go right to certain parts of a video you may like and it is quicker then fast forwarding to a part.

For those who like to take screen shots of DVD’s you can do that as well with PowerDVD. You can have it so the screen shot goes to the windows clipboard or you can have it saved as a file in a folder of your choosing.

Another good feature in PowerDVD is the parental lock it has. If you have kids and want to make sure they can only watch G rated DVD’s you can have the software setup to block anything but G rated DVD’S. The only way to override the Parental Block is if you know the login and the password that you would have setup before hand. Make sure you don’t get your computer savy kids to set up PowerDVD if you want to use the Parental controls.

For those that want to be able to grab a media file from windows explorer and drop it on the PowerDVD interface to play the file will be happy to know PowerDVD supports that and it certainly makes playing files from the hard drive a lot faster.

At the time of this Article the Deluxe version of PowerDVD 6.0 cost about $70.00 U.S They have a non Deluxe Version for about $50.00 U.S, you can also download a 30 day trial Version of the software from the Cyberlink web site.

In Conclusion I have to say over all I’m pretty impressed with this software and it will be my first choice when it comes to playing Video files of any sort. As mentioned above I would have liked to have seen a more flexible Equalizer to use but that is a small compliant and hopefully that will be addressed in the future.

Below are a few screen shots i put together to give you an idea of what the program looks like.

WolfManz611..