We’re not too sure about the latter, but the detail enhancement works well – we compared the results with our Denon 1920 DVD player, which boasts dedicated, hardware-accelerated upscaling and were impressed. Pop a DVD movie into your optical drive and PowerDVD’s “TrueTheatre” engine gives you the option to boost the detail and intensity of the picture and smooth out the motion. More importantly, though, HD content that stuttered on our test laptop (1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM) when played back via Windows Media Player and VLC ran smoothly in PowerDVD9.Īnother string to PowerDVD’s bow is its upscaling of DVDs. As well as Blu-ray discs (it also comes with a plug-in for Windows Media Center users), it played every single video format we threw at it without breaking sweat, including MKVs, AVCHD files and all manner of weird and wonderful native camcorder formats. In fact, PowerDVD turns out to be a very capable movie player indeed. At least with this piece of software Blu-ray is not all you get.

Power dvd ultra 20