Video: Cyberlink's native Media Center Blu-ray player

by Ben Drawbaugh posted Jan 9th 2009 at 9:16PM

At this point most aren't happy with Microsoft's progress of adding new features to Windows Media Center, but lucky for Blu-ray fans there are other companies willing to pick up the slack. The first to create Blu-ray software that tried to focus on the Media Center crowd was ArcSoft with its TotalMedia Theater, but although it was better than anything else out there, it is far from seamless. Competition is good and at Microsoft's booth we got to see a demo of the new Cyberlink PowerDVD Media Center player. It was far and away more seamless than the older PowerDVD and although it was very Media Center like, it still wasn't the same -- the most obvious difference is the scrub bar, which looks nothing like the Media Center scrub bar. This is an early version and is far from snappy. You can see in the video there are some pretty long delays when loading the disc, but to be fair it was tested on a netbook. Ultimately we liked it more than TotalMedia Theater, but we still long for native Blu-ray playback.

Filed under: Features, Blu-ray, Media PCs

Tags: 7MC, Cyberlink, features, PowerDVD, VMC, Windows Media Center, WindowsMediaCenter

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Highly Ranked

Starkenator @ Jan 9th 2009 11:30PM

Why did they use a netbook to show off Blu-ray playback performance in Media Center? They did not want to have to carry in a 15 inch notebook with an integrated drive? Was this on VMC or was it on the Windows 7 beta?

Neutral

Peter F @ Jan 11th 2009 8:40PM

Windows7

Neutral

Tom @ Jan 10th 2009 1:47AM

Microsoft just wanted to demonstrate how highly optimized Windows Media Center is. This also shows off how optimized PowerDVD is... full Blu-ray playback on a single-core Atom processor. This was on the Win 7 Beta. Of course, it would have been a lot snappier on a typical WMC PC.

This is a pre-release version of PowerDVD. The final release will be further optimized, and the seek bar will match the usual WMC seek bar.

Neutral

Ryan @ Feb 9th 2009 5:39PM

I read that in Australia the LG HDDVD/Blu-ray players have been shipped with PowerDVD7 and a plugin to integrate it with Vista Media Center, it's not available to download a separate product but can be found on the Cyberlink website. I searched for an open source solution which I've wirtten about in my blog for anyone that is interested in trying a free plugin, it's pretty quick to transition from Media Center to PowerDVD and launch the movie.

www.ryanzane.blogspot.com

Ryan

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