Cyberlink PowerDVD 9 Ultra DVD and Blu-ray player

To play Blu-ray movies on a PC you need a software decoder. PowerDVD is one of the most venerable on the market, and version nine has new features to improve your viewing experience.

The most useful is True Theater HD, which upscales DVDs to high definition. Just as many hardware DVD players can reproduce standard-definition video in 720p, so can PowerDVD 9.

It also has a feature called True Theatre Motion, which smooths playback of fast-moving action scenes ­ useful on LCD televisions.

True Theatre Lighting improves picture clarity by dynamically enhancing colours in dark scenes, with a set of profiles to choose from.

We tested these features by watching a DVD in PowerDVD 9 and in another player without upscaling. The picture quality in PowerDVD was between DVD and Blu-ray. No upscaled video is the same quality as a true high-definition source, but the image quality was noticeably better than the non-upscaled video.

PowerDVD 9 installs a plug-in to watch Blu-ray discs in Windows Media Center. PowerDVD still decodes the movie in the background, but you can switch to a Blu-ray source using your remote control, rather than needing a separate application.

You won’t be able to play HD DVDs in PowerDVD as Cyberlink dropped support for the format from version eight. The version we tested had compatibility problems with 64-bit Vista, crashing or locking up when we tried to load media files. None of these problems occurred on 32-bit Windows XP, although Cyberlink assures us this bug will be patched quickly.

As many media applications now support Blu-ray the extras in PowerDVD 9, such as upscaling and its Media Center plug-in, help it stand out as a pricey but complete package.