InterVideo Ships Time-Stretching WinDVD Player Wanna Watch a 90-Minute DVD in an Hour? Eric Grevstad
Mon 7/15/02 -- Any DVD player software will let you fast-forward through the boring parts of a movie, but the new WinDVD 4 from InterVideo Inc. lets you watch the whole movie faster. The new retail version of the popular OEM player boasts an exclusive "time-stretching" feature that lets you specify a "Finish by" or "View in" time -- say, "View in 90 minutes" if your laptop lacks the battery life for a two-hour flick -- and compresses or stretches the DVD's running time to fit, without distorting the audio (even multichannel audio).
WinDVD 4's integrated screen capture and browser utility makes it easy to capture, save, and sort still images from DVD movies, while TV-out support lets your PC serve as a living-room DVD player. The program can play DVD content from a hard disk folder, helpful for downloaded MPEG-2 files or use with DVD authoring software. And a "Video Desktop" option plays a movie as Windows wallpaper, behind your icons and application windows.
WinDVD 4 costs $50. For $80, WinDVD 4 Plus adds full TV-style contrast and color adjustments and gamma correction to fix brightness and color saturation for optimal viewing with any combination of LCD or monitor and lighting conditions, as well as support for DTS Digital, Dolby EX, and Dolby Pro Logic II sound.
