Stories about: PowerDVD

Reader Anibal is looking to outfit his PC with a Blu-ray drive and wants to know if there's any good, low-cost (or free) software for watching Blu-ray movies.

CyberLink's PowerDVD 10 Ultra, the most powerful and stable DVD and Blu-ray movie player available, offers an array of new features in the new version. The biggest boost, however, comes from 3D support.

The ASUS SBC-06D1S-U is an external Blu-ray drive designed for PC-based home theatre systems. In addition to playing Blu-ray discs, it is also a capable DVD burner. (This is a function that many external BD drives lack.) Alongside its DVD burning capabilities, the Asus SBC-06D1S-U’s main claims to fame are its 6x BD read speed and sleek, arresting design. It also runs entirely through a USB 2.0 interface – subsequently, no DC power supply is required.

What do you do if all you want is to watch Blu-ray films on your PC? Well, you could do a lot worse than slipping in the Lite-On iHOS104 budget-priced BD-ROM drive.

One of the most-talked about changes in Microsoft's Windows 7 is how it handles media files. The methods for photo and video importing, editing, and exporting have been all updated. You have new options for sharing and streaming files between computers. And media libraries become more-versatile vessels for finding and managing media files. I'll explain how to get started with these and other entertainment features of Windows 7.

The ASRock Ion 330HT-BD is a 'nettop' desktop PC with Intel's Atom 330 1.6GHz dual-core processor and NVIDIA ION integrated graphics. It has hardware acceleration to play back 1080p Blu-ray video free of any stuttering or buffering, and the integrated graphics are good enough for some limited gaming.

In PowerDVD, CyberLink already has one of the most popular playback solutions for DVD and Blu-ray on Windows PCs. With its new version 9 Ultra, CyberLink introduces several new features, including TrueTheatre video enhancement, support for HDMI 1.3, different playback screen modes, FancyView graphical browsing, and support for more high-definition video and audio formats.

The Swann PenCam DVR (SPY-420) is the kind of gadget that no aspiring 007 agent should be without. It’s essentially a video camera hidden inside a functioning ballpoint pen, complete with an inbuilt microphone and 2GB of flash memory. According to the box blurb, it’s “perfect for mystery shopping, covert surveillance or Internet fun” (none of which sounds particularly legal to us). The astonishing thing is that it actually takes pretty good video when used in optimum lighting. Considering its lens is the size of a pin hole, this is a pretty impressive feat.

VIA Vinyl VT1818S and VT1828S HD audio codecs transform the PC experience, bringing unparalleled quality to 24-bit/192 kHz high-definition audio playback and recording

Life just got easier for users of the downloadable or boxed retail versions of the Ubuntu Linux 8.04 operating system who want easy and cheap ways of adding DVD playback and improved audio capabilities to their machines.