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The CLEV split screen option shows you exactly what image improvements are being implemented

The Deluxe version of PowerDVD differs from the regular edition in only two ways. It can process DTS audio tracks, found on an increasingly larger number of DVD titles and generally considered to be superior in quality to Dolby Digital. There’s also Dolby Virtual Speaker, a method of encoding non-Dolby audio sources into Dolby compatible streams. Although this is generally of no use when playing back DVDs, it’s nonetheless useful when using PowerDVD to playback other media formats. It’s not just a DVD player; PowerDVD can cope with SVCD, MP3 and a variety of other formats.

The Standard version of PowerDVD will set you back £30.54 while the Deluxe Edition we’re looking at comes in at £43.46. The good news is that both versions implement all of the new features that separate version 5 from version 4.

Outwardly, version 5 is little different to version 4. The on-screen controls are all very similar, the same skins are present and all the controls are in the same places. As mentioned before, the differences in the video and audio processing engines in PowerDVD 5, which caused the version number hop, are all under the hood.

CLEV (CyberLink Eagle Vision) is the first of the new enhancements. Eagle Vision purports to automatically enhance the brightness, contrast and colour levels of the displayed DVD as it’s playing, to keep the picture bright, colourful and clear. You can’t use hardware acceleration with CLEV, it uses your CPU to post-process the decoded video and apply the effect. There’s also no control over the quality and strength of the effect, it simply uses a one-shot algorithm to determine if the frame needs the processing applied. There’s a split setting, which displays your film with one half of the image untouched and the other half with CLEV applied, so that you can decide whether you prefer it on or off.

There’s no hotkey toggle for the effect though, something that would be nice to see. I watched a few titles to test the effect, Pirates of the Caribbean, Matrix Reloaded and The Mothman Prophecies, and all benefited from CLEV being enabled. For really dark films it can sometimes overcompensate and saturate the image with too much colour and brightness, The Mothman Prophecies would look very blue in places that should have been pitch black, but 99 per cent of the time it seems to be a good thing to have on. CPU usage ranged from 6 per cent with GPU Hardware Acceleration enabled, through to 10 per cent for software only, 15 per cent for split-CLEV and 21 per cent average for the full effect. The test platform used was an AMD Athlon XP3200+ processor and GeForce FX5900 Ultra, on an nForce2 motherboard.

The next new technology, CLMEI (CyberLink Multi-channel Environment Impression technology), is a software up-mixing algorithm, which converts stereo audio sources to multi-channel audio streams for playback on multiple speaker audio setups. While stereo track DVDs are very rare, CLMEI works with the other stereo audio formats that PowerDVD supports. MP3 audio and MP3 audio embedded into DivX/XviD encoded movies are the usual recipients and testing showed that it works admirably. Playing back a DivX 5.0 encode of The Count of Monte Cristo, using MP3 audio, gave good sound reproduction over all eight connected speakers on an Envy24 based soundcard, driving a Creative Labs’ Inspire T7700 speaker set. The effect has three presets, standard, Movie Mode and OnStage, for listening to music, movie audio and audio you wish to reproduce with a subtle concert hall effect. Again, a hotkey toggle would be desirable, as with CLEV.

The last notable feature, CLPV (CyberLink Pano Vision) is a software video scaler that intelligently resizes certain types of video content to fit the display device. Only able to work with 4:3 aspect video sources, CLPV nonetheless did a good job of stretching the video to fit a widescreen television, driven by the FX5900 Ultra. It can also keep a slight border at the bottom of the video for subtitled material. Software scaling is something PCs do very well; able to match or beat the output of very expensive hardware scalers. CLVP seems a decent, if limited, substitute for other software such as DScaler.

The question then remains as to whether the new features in PowerDVD 5.0 Deluxe represent enough of an incentive to upgrade, both from previous versions of PowerDVD, or from other software DVD players such as Intervideo’s WinDVD.

With modern processors more than able to cope with effects like CLEV and CLPV, along with the recent surge in multi-channel audio systems for CLMEI to work with, I’d have to say yes. It’s difficult to justify if you already have a multi-channel audio software player. Then CLEV and CLPV maybe aren’t enough to tempt you on their own, but as an upgrade from a crippled, bundled, version of another application, it’s worth the money.

Verdict

If you don't have a software DVD player or are looking to upgrade from a limited feature bundled application PowerDVD 5 Deluxe should definitely be high on your list.

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