PowerDVD 20 Ultra – CyberLink PowerDVD is a universal media player for photos, music, video files, and movie discs. When it comes to the development of media players, over the years developers at CyberLink, have always been able to deliver the goods as expected, ensuring we get to have not only the best media player that money can buy but also stretching the visual capabilities of the hardware it’s installed on.
No wonder it is the first world’s first and only software media player to pass the BD-ROM 4.0 PC Application Software License process.
PowerDVD 20 Ultra Interface and Functionality
The all-in-one premium media player for windows released it’s the latest version of the PowerDVD 20 on April 14, 2020. PowerDVD features two modes: The PC mode suitable for computers, and the TV Mode designed especially for TVs. CyberLink provides the Power Remote App that can be used to control the TV Mode on your smartphone.
Standard Features
Before we get into the new stuff that the Ultra version gives us, let’s take a somewhat basic look into what makes the PowerDVD 20 better than other DVD players out there. Well, no price for guessing that the program started as a tool to play DVD movies (including copy-protected commercial titles) from a PC.
It’s still capable of doing just that as well as supporting new Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray movie discs if you’ve got an HDCP- capable GPU. It’s also capable of playing the most popular video, audio, and image files, although it’s not exactly so universal as the company tells us in adverts.
Some legal (Real Media) and codger codecs (some AVC and some FLV) that VLC would handle with ease won’t play or sometimes play as only audio. We’ll seem we can’t eat our cake and have it when it comes to video support. The program is also a more than capable librarian and organizer with playlist, rankings, and the likes.
Even though it’s not quite friendly with antiques, the PowerDVD’s true treasure lies init’s TrueTheater enhancements: image/color correction and enhancement, motion enhancement to make motion smoother. However, not all these are available with all hardware, and your PC needs to support it before PowerDVD can give it to you.
Power DVD is capable of streaming videos from different sources like YouTube and Vimeo. It also pins YouTube videos for offline viewing — well, isn’t that just wonderful!
The $100 Ultra and 365 ($55 annually) versions of PowerDVD support all the new(some not so new) technologies like the 3D, 360-degree video with Spatial Audio,8K UHD, HDR and more. If it’s a cool new feature or if it were a cool new feature, CyberLink had got it covered — at least for the Ultra version.
The Newly Introduced Features.
As mentioned earlier, the most interesting new feature in PowerDVD 20, is the clout of CyberLink’s online storage infrastructure for storing, sharing, and remotely viewing movies. This service allows users to store and enjoy files on the cloud anywhere and from any device, including smartphones with the free Power Media Player App.
The CyberLink cloud is more than just your regular cloud service. It can be used as a home media center, supporting multi-screen media libraries, storing media files, and sharing them across different computers, mobile devices, and home media devices while optimizing HDR videos on SDR display. 100 GB storage is provided for free for one year with the continual version of PowerDVD 20 Ultra being renewed at $10 per 10 GB per year, also up to a maximum of 100 GB.
The 365 rental version is also renewable for only $55 and seems like a better deal if you are a heavy user of cloud storage services. On the other hand, if you only use it lightly, the continual license with less capacity should be a better offer
PowerDVD 20 also supports a seamless playback that recovers from the instant of time when you stop watching. On the same timeline, you can move the markers to select what to watch and enable other options to save instances of time with bookmarks, change subtitles, change audio languages when available, and save snapshots.
Video Quality and Overall performance.
No offense to other media players out there, but honestly speaking, they don’t have the True-this, and True-that video enhancements discussed up top. With the PowerDVD 20, you get to play videos that are better than the original!
The PowerDVD 20 offers a full home cinema experience, supporting Ultra Blu-ray quality, 2160p (4K UHD), and 4320p (8K UHD) video resolution, HDR 10, and other audio formats such as FLAC and DSD. That’s not all because we haven’t gotten to the cool part just yet. The unique TrueTheater feature enhances color dept, blacks, and overall lighting better than an original experience on your media.
It comes with an immersive audio quality with the new DTSX pass-through feature that works on any personal video or online video. Yeah, the PowerDVD 20 Ultra really brought the video home this time.