1/25/03 - I wanted to update the list of available players and make a few other updates. I never did get around to those reviews I had planned to do a while ago, mostly it was due to a faulty DVD drive which made me waste the time I had set aside. Who knows, maybe now that football (US style) is done I will get them done with the latest versions. One big thing you will notice here is the drop-off of many of the old DVD players. The products and even the companies in some cases have disappeared. I have also added one player for the first time in a while which is the nVidia nDVD player. Hopefully I will test it soon as well. As always if there is some player I don't have listed here let me know.
6/29/02 - Part one of a two part big update I hope. Well thanks to the popularity and traffic of this site some of the DVD software makers have taken notice. What his means is I now have easier and better access to some of the players so that I can review them. I am in the process of getting my test bed system up and working, it will have XP SP1 on it for the latest testing results. Today I am going to update some versions, check links and rewrite all the mini reviews with current info. Hopefully tomorrow or sooner I will begin putting up full reviews of some of the newer players.
4/17/02 - I wanted to do a quick update to change the version numbers and links for the available programs. Also I am updating the table to include whether the program is available with DTS or as an XP Pack. If you don't know what an XP pack is, it allows you to watch DVD's using media player 8.0 and only a purchase of stripped decoder for $15-20. I will hopefully be doing reviews of all the latest versions of these programs soon. I am trying to determine what hardware I want to use, I think a baseline machine with minimum requirements will better test the quality of the decoders.
8/22/01 - Well another long wait for an update. Tonight I am just going to update some links, hopefully in the next week or so I will add some reviews. You might ask why are your reviews special, well I am going to review compatibility with Windows XP Professional. Something which hasn't been covered yet. Some other things have happened in the last few months. A new DVD Decoder named CoolDVD, and updates to a few others. It also seems that XingDVD has finally been put to rest after the purchase of Xingtech by Real Networks. As always, questions welcome.
1/03/01 - Long time no update, and big changes this time. As I said when I created this site over 2 years ago, as soon as Ravisent (then QI and Divicore in between) made its fine Software Cinemaster program available I would remove information about the necessary files to use it. That has been done. The second major reason for this site (and my initial support for Cinemaster) was working with SCSI DVD-ROM drives. Well at this point the SCSI DVD-ROM market has been reduced to Pioneer and the competitve Software DVD decoder market has been reduced to three players. Those three players, Cyberlink, Intervideo and Ravisent all support SCSI DVD-ROM drives and all operating systems from 95 to 2000 and everything in between. There isn't a whole lot of use for compatibility info any longer. I still would like to put up my own reviews of players and may be able to soon. Until then I hope you enjoy the current crop of DVD Software Decoders.
| Player Company - Player Name and current version | Versions Previously Available | ||
| DD | DTS | XP | |
| CoolDVD - CoolDVD V2.86 | No | No | No |
| National Semiconductor - DVDMatics V6.0.1132 | Yes | No | Yes |
| nVidia - nVDVD 2.55 | Yes | No | No |
| Roxio - SoftDVDMax V6.0 | No | No | No |
| Varo Vision - VaroDVD V2.5 | No | No | No |
| Xing - XingDVD V2.05 | No | No | No |
One of the original goals of this page was to help those with SCSI DVD-ROM drives, the majority of which were made by Pioneer. Most SCSI DVD-ROM drives are still made by Pioneer, but Toshiba has also released some now. I am happy to be able to say that I have personally verified that PowerDVD 2.0915, WinDVD 1.2.99, VaroDVD 1.34, DVDExpress V5.00.10.1 and Cinemaster 2.0.36 now work with SCSI DVD-ROM drives, and if anyone has first hand knowledge of the other players working with SCSI DVD-ROM drives let me know.
CoolDVD - The company that produces this appears to have vanished and I am guessing the product along with it. If anyone knows where it has gone let me know and I update my links.
PowerDVD - This is one of the better players with possibly the best interface and it keeps getting better all the time through rapid updates. It is probably my second favorite player right now. It is also the only player that I know that will function on cards that don't support software overlay surfaces; a consideration that can help people with older cards.
WinDVD - The WinDVD player is my favorite at the moment. They are currently at the 4.0 version and they continue to improve and innovate with this product. All of the basic features are there, and then a whole host of new features keep being added.
DVDMatics - The DVDExpress player was originally developed by MediaMatics it has since changed hands to National Semiconductor. At first it seemed as though National Semiconductor was content to allow this player to be a smalltime OEM player and fade off into oblivion. However just recently they redeployed this player as DVMatics and made it available in retail. One nice thing they did was release updates to upgrade all the existing OEM versions of DVDExpress to XP. I am hoping to do a full blown review of the new retail product in the very near future.
nVDVD - This player is fairly new (at least being sold as standalone product) from one of the largest video card makers nVidia. One would assume it will utilize the capabilities of nVidia graphics cards as much or better than any other player. It remains to be seen if that is the case though.
SoftDVD Max - As I had guessed would happen this product seems to have been killed off by Roxio, I have contacted Roxio to verify and will update if I find anything out. The SoftDVD player changed hands many times, most recently Roxio has acquired MGI Soft which includes SoftDVD Max. This player was originally called SoftDVD when Zoran produced it. I am not sure what happened to the DirectDVD product that MGI bought from Intel long ago. I haven't played with the 6.0 version of this product yet, but unless they made some amazing improvements this product can't hold a candle to the top three. It had one shining feature which was its Dolby headphone support but now almost all other players have this now.
CinePlayer - This player has changed hands rather than just changing names. It was originally developed by a company called Quadrant International that company then changed its name to DiviCore for a about a week and later to Ravisent. In a recent move the company merged with someone else and changed its name again to Axeda. Apparently soon thereafter the CinePlayer suite of applications was sold to Sonic, who is a well known player in the DVD Authoring market. This player is still good mainly for its small size and quick speed. It doesn't have all the fancy features of a PowerDVD or WinDVD, but the core video and stereo sound quality in it still holds up. This player holds a special spot in my heart for many reasons, not the least of which is that is was the original reason I started this page long ago.
VaroDVD - This company appears to have gone away as well now. The player hadn't been on sale for a while anyway. Even with its latest version (which was basically a total rewrite), this program still is not up to the task. It has an mediocre-interface but is overall on par quality-wise with SoftDVD. I would not recommend this product. Another problem with this product I found while testing is that it takes all associations for .vob, .mov, .wav and many more without asking. It also causes problems with other decoders such as PowerDVD.
XingDVD - One of the most notorious players has disappeared forever I would assume. Xing has been purchased by Real and has since removed any mention of this player from their site. According to reports a failure of Xing to properly protect their player allowed for the development of the program DeCSS, which I am sure lead to its disappearance.
This section is in real need of updating with the recent releases as well as testing on both Windows Millenium and Windows 2000 Professional.
With recent updates a few of the Software DVD Decoders have started promising full Dolby Digital support with 4-speaker output. To test this advancement I took the most recent versions of my three favorite decoders and played the audio setup portion of Video Essentials. My setup was Windows 98 (not SE yet), with DirectX 6.1, a Pioneer DVD-303S (SCSI DVD-ROM drive) and a Diamond Monster Sound MX300 with a Cambridge Sound Works 4 Point Sound system attached. I am running the latest release Aureal Reference drivers. I honestly don't know what parts of these programs are specifically using A3D to get their output and thus will not work with a SB Live!. However PowerDVD promises 4 speaker output with SB Live! and doesn't even mention A3D in the readme, so I would hope it works as well or better on a SB Live!
PowerDVD - More testing needs to be done with this program; after an install of VaroDVD it started having lots of problems and I need to figure out what happened. I did the testing of PowerDVD utilizing the recently released 2.0906 version. After the installation I found two points worth noting. One, you must apparently select DirectSound to get anything more then 2 speaker output. Secondly, it appears that you must wait until you start playing a movie before you select speaker mode; otherwise it does not remember the setting and goes back to 2 speaker output. I selected the option of 4 speaker output rather then the A3D specific one; A3D seemed to simulate surround utilizing 2 speakers rather then using all four speakers discretely. During initial testing PowerDVD appeared to present all 4 channels individually, properly and separately. It also simulated the center channel well. It seemed to work flawlessly with Dolby Digital Output, except for LFE or subwoofer output (which I will mention more below). After the install of VaroDVD 1.34 I could no longer reproduce this performance. I have tried uninstalling all Software DVD Decoders on my machine and reinstall PowerDVD, however I could still not get it to produce discrete 4-channel output. I have heard from other sources that this does indeed work on the SBLive! though. Once I have a true testbed setup that I can rebuild the OS on I will do more testing on this application.
WinDVD - I did the testing of WinDVD utilizing a install of 1.2.85 with patched files from the 1.2.99 release. To get four speaker output with WinDVD you have to edit the registry. Specifically you need to change the Audio key to a value of 4 in the HKEY_Local_Machine\Software\Intervideo\WinDVD. This is because Intervideo has disabled this option in their interface for WinDVD, however the code to support the feature is still in WinDVD. As with PowerDVD, WinDVD presented all 4 channels individually, properly and separately. WinDVD also simulated a center channel well. This player is currently reproducing sound the best on my machine, in the recent 1.2.99 patch Intervideo added LFE support so now this player does it all. This player was not disturbed by any of the other players on my machine which is a bonus as well.
Software Cinemaster 99 - I included this Software Decoder for comparison's sake and because it is still one of my favorite decoders. Ravisent neither claims nor supports 4 speaker output in even its newest 2.0.36 version. As expected, all right or left sound effects whether front or rear came out of both the front and rear of their respective channels. Basically the MX300 is duplicating the sound sent to the front channel on the rear channel. Interestingly this player does include a function to deal with the LFE effects, however with the lack of even Dolby Surround support on 4 speakers it wasn't worth testing.
Of the three above players PowerDVD is now the only one that does not support .1 or LFE mixing. As of its latest version WinDVD is now the champion as far as I am concerned for reproducing Dolby Digital tracks on DVD's correctly. It may not sound as good as my stereo yet, but it sounds pretty good for coming out of a $80 dollar sound card connected to a $80 set of speakers.
If you have done any similar testing on players other than the ones I mentioned above or if you have found different results from that of my own, please let me know so that I may correct my info or add to it (of course crediting you).
Cinemaster Information - This page has good info on the Cinemaster engine and news about it.
Gray's DVD Page - Some info on getting Software Cinemaster 98 working.