WinDVD Platinum 5 Review The Coolest Way To Waste Time at Your PC Eric Grevstad
Mon 9/15/03 -- ATI and Nvidia are using the word cinematic a lot lately to tout the latest graphics cards and 3D games. We're looking forward to Half-Life 2 as much as anyone, but our idea of cinematic entertainment on the PC is still watching cinema -- DVD movies. And there's no better way to do that than with InterVideo's WinDVD Platinum 5.
Chances are that an older, "lite" version of WinDVD -- or its rival, CyberLink's PowerDVD -- came preinstalled on your PC, assuming it has a DVD-ROM drive. So why would you want to pay a fairly hefty $70 for the Platinum 5 version plus $13 for the Audio Booster Pack that adds home-theater-style multichannel (or mock multichannel if you have just two speakers) support -- plus, perhaps, $20 for the Mobile Technology Pack that stretches playback time on Intel Pentium M notebooks or $40 for the DVD-Audio Pack that lets you access all the features of those new stereophiles' discs?
Well, if you're just an occasional DVD-watcher, you won't. But if you've invested in a high-quality sound card and 5.1 speaker setup, a growing library of DVDs, or both, WinDVD Platinum 5 is a luxury that's easy to get used to.
See It Clear -- Or See It Weird
For one thing, the program insures you're getting the best possible view of your movies. One of its myriad control panels offers presets for optimized viewing on a CRT monitor, LCD panel, TV set, or even a conference-room projector; you can override these with manual adjustments for brightness, contrast, color, hue, and gamma correction, or adjust a disc's interlaced-for-TV video content to look better on your progressive-scan PC screen.
When you're not viewing in full-screen mode, you can lock or unlock the WinDVD window's aspect ratio; when you are, you can choose between widescreen and TV-style pan-and-scan options to make 4:3 video look more like 16:9 -- or for that matter, turn the movie into the Windows desktop, running behind your taskbar, icons, and other program windows. A pan-and-scan function lets you zoom in or watch the movie through a movable magnifying window.
The program offers several different enhancement modes -- real-time video equivalents of Adobe Photoshop still-image filters -- designed to make video look crisper, along with others that can make it look blurrier, antique-sepia-toned, abstract or posterized, or even like a photo negative. Each offers a half-screen preview (so you can adjust the effect, play with combinations of effects, or just smile as characters walk in and out of focus on the left and right sides of the screen) as well as full-screen views.
Of course you can jump to specific chapters, pause or freeze the movie, or hurry through fast forward or reverse. But WinDVD Platinum 5 gives you extra ways to turn back time -- an adjustable backspace or instant replay that repeats the previous 10 seconds (or other interval) when you press Ctrl-B; a similar "skip forward X seconds" with Ctrl-Q; the option to repeat or loop not only a chapter or the whole title but any point-A-to-point-B segment you specify.
And if you're in a hurry, you can turn characters' romantic stroll into a run -- changing the playback speed from 1X to 1.25X, 1.5X, or some other fraction up to double speed, watching the remaining 90 minutes of a movie in the 60 minutes before your plane lands, with audio pitch automatically adjusted so Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus don't sound like Alvin, Simon, and Theodore. (Even so, more than maybe 1.5X acceleration is hard to follow, but it's a nifty feature to play with.) A similar option compensates for the 4-percent speed difference between American NTSC movies and European PAL DVDs.
The Audio Booster Kit expands on WinDVD's variety of sound adjustments, from optimizing audio for your headphones or number of speakers (with or without a subwoofer) to simulating surround sound on just two speakers or applying SRS bass and dialog enhancements or echo and pitch changes. You can even adjust individual speakers' volume and add a few milliseconds of delay so all sounds reach you simultaneously. WinDVD supports deluxe sound cards' 96KHz/24-bit audio encoding and S/PDIF output as well as low-fi motherboard sound chips.
Kodak Moments
The program gives you plenty of ways to relive favorite movie moments, too. A high-quality screen capture or still frame is as easy as tapping the P key; you can save and browse multiple images and delete ones you don't want before saving them all at once in either JPG or BMP format. You can also overrule the movie studio's own chapter divisions by saving and jumping among bookmarks of beloved scenes or lines of dialogue, or even make MP3-style playlists of DVD bookmarks, CD audio tracks, and VCD files.
Again, WinDVD Platinum 5's options are overkill and overpriced for casual or infrequent movie-viewers. But if you're a film buff with high-class video and sound cards in your system, or a frequent flier and laptop DVD addict, it's a great way to watch it your way.
