What software DVD Player? (1 Viewer)

[DonRoeber]

I've been a longtime mac user, and although I still use my Macs, I recently got a Dell Latitude D600 running Windows XP. On my Mac, it was easy - there was one program you could use for playing DVDs. On XP, it seems like there are a bunch more. So, what's good? My Dell came with WinDVD, and Spirited Away just installed InterActual Player. I also get the the impression that both Real Player and Windows Media Player can also play DVDs.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Free is good.

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

Interactual player is bad ( think it only uses filters already installed, it's basically a clumsy front end).

Sonic DVD is considered pretty good, and WinDVD/PowerDVD are adequate for laptop playback. PowerDVD has decent features, but again- for laptop playback, the differnces in software become much more feature based and less picture quality.

-vince

 

[Lyle_JP]

PowerDVD is the best player where no hardware acceleration is being used and your CPU is decent. I guess you could call it the best "software rendering" DVD player.

The newest WinDVD seems to exploit the DVD hardware acceleration in the recent common video chipsets (GeForce4, Radeon) the best.

-Lyle J.P.