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muchfedup: I upgraded last year from preinstalled...
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Page 4 of 4: WinDVD 9 Review Conclusions/Ratings

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WinDVD 9 Review Conclusions/Ratings

WinDVD 9 is a good improvement upon WinDVD 8, not just because it adds high definition disc playback. The interface has been improved, so has stability. In terms of features, it has all the options you would expect, plus more that you won't ever need. It is fast to start and feels fast to use.

The new features, such as All2HD, can be quite useful if you have powerful enough hardware to utilize it. And the Blu-ray and HD DVD playback feels much more polished than first generation players such as PowerDVD Ultra or the various OEM versions of WinDVD that supported Blu-ray/HD DVD playback. The best part is that even old hardware can work with WinDVD to playback Blu-ray and HD DVD movies, although performance is exactly what you would expect from old hardware: choppy.

WinDVD 8 felt like a step backwards and several steps behind PowerDVD 7. But WinDVD 9 is perfectly able to compete with PowerDVD, and offers some features that perhaps we can only look forward to in PowerDVD 8. This is a good first effort by Corel and WinDVD 9 is highly recommended as a DVD/Blu-ray/HD DVD player.

WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray Ratings:

- Performance
- Quality
- Usability
- Features
- Value
- Overall

Related Links:

The review version of WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray was provided by Corel.

For archives of all previous WinDVD version reviews, please refer to the WinDVD Review Archive.

 

 

 


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Article Navigation:

Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: What's new in WinDVD 9
Page 3: Full Review of WinDVD 9
Page 4: WinDVD 9 Review Conclusions/Ratings <--

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I upgraded last year from preinstalled WinDVD 5 to WinDVD 7 Platinum on a brand new Toshiba Qosmio player W pro SP2 MCE. Wasn't too impressed as the program only starts when it wants. Sometimes ok, sometimes I get nothing at all on double click. Support never replied. This year, I decided to write over this failed install and upgraded to WinDVD 8 Platinum. The install process went fine, wrote over a perfectly fine, registered and up to date version of Quick Time. the installer then downloaded a newer(...) version of Windows installer, went through the install process and left me at the end with an error 1628 failed installation. I can see WinDVD 8 in c/program file but if i click on the exe file, it first sends me to a registration page, then asks me if i would like to take part into some kind of online survey and then I get a Windows error, would you like to send the file to Microsoft. I repeated the same full process several times emptying the temp file every time. No program icon has been created, no short cut in the start menu, no entry in the "add remove program". Arghhhhhhh. How do I get rid of it. I tried contacting support @ intervideo through their automated link and received an email bak: user unknown. I tried "sales" with the same result. Their agent in the UK doesn't answer the phone. I finally managed to send an email to "billing" and await a reply. I have lost a lot of time and money. No way to contact the company and my computer is now clustered with a useless program impossible to remove. Shame there is no 0 rating.
Posted by: muchfedup, 00:22:43, Nov 26, 2006


muchfedup: This support document from InstallShield might help your situation: http://consumer.installshield.com/kb.asp?id=Q108464
Posted by: DVDGuy, 02:27:07, Nov 26, 2006


I am absolutely disappointed by WinDVD 8. As as producer of DVD-Audio disks, up to now I used and recommended to my customers older versions of Inter Video WinDVD to play DVD-Audio Disks. I recently tried to update to WinDVD 8 and was not anymore able to play DVD-A's, not even my own disks. Apparently this feature was deliberately omitted in Win DVD 8 without any notice to potential customers. Fortunately Cyberlink's PowerDVD and Creative's DVD-A Player still work with DVD-A's. Don't ever update programs if not absolutely necessary! Gregor Antes, www.laborantes.com
Posted by: laboraudio, 01:16:46, Jan 2, 2007


laboraudio: WinDVD 8 does not have DVD-Audio playback due to issues that relates to people using it to rip the DVD-Audio discs. Our review did not really cover DVD-Audio in extensive detail, but I will be sure to update it to reflect this in the future.
Posted by: DVDGuy, 13:42:04, Jan 2, 2007


WinDVD9 is a big disappointment for me. It completely removed DSP playback of MP3's. Even the equalizer is disabled. WinDVD's digital signal processing of mp3's is unrivaled. This has been the best reason why I use WinDVD and Corel completely ripped it off! The other complete disappointment is that WinDVD9 is memory hungry. It will drain most of your computer resources if you run it on an old system. It will keep crashing if you force it to play something and poke around the settings. I'm reinstalling back WinDVD7, the most stable so far.
Posted by: Humanpixels, 11:21:58, May 20, 2008


As for me, the original (InterVideo) WinDVD8 Platinum is the best software DVD player so far, mostly due to appeal and Trimension technology. The main disadvantages of Corel WinDVD9 when compared to older version are: 1) The absence of "Pan&Scan" function (Zoom&Pan works quite different); 2) Every time started, the Trimension technology has to be enabled manually; 3) When enabled "all2hd" and/or Trimension, the brightness, contrast, saturation etc. can only be changed from graphics control panel - the appropriate sliders in WinDVD9 become disabled. 4) The absence of Video- and AudioCenter is disappointing. 5) The new skin is ugly (subjective).
Posted by: Chevre, 09:29:51, Feb 23, 2009


WInDVD 9 can be a good product features-wise, it is just very unstable, especially on Vista 64 platform. Bluray and even regular DVD discs would play sometimes but vey inconsistent and then you would get the MFC error nag and the application closes. Meanwhile the code still runs on the background consuming tons of CPU resources. The SUPPORT for the producr is even more atrocious. I opened up a ticket and all I got back was this pre-canned, computer generated response. I am computer savvy (systems programmer) and tried eveything that I know and heeded known solution suggestions from the different web sites to no avail. All it did for me was plenty of headaches and a few sleepless nights. I will not recommend this product to anyone.t
Posted by: nemencio, 00:21:48, Mar 26, 2009



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