WinDVD 8 Gold sucks beautifully

FINDING THE RIGHT software DVD player has been a chore and, unfortunately, there still isn't a good, cheap, flexible answer to the very simple problem of playing DVDs.

Some of the blame can be pointed at bloody mindedness, the machine used to test the software is running Windows XP 64bit edition, but if there are problems on a mainstream Microsoft operating system that has been available for a year and a half, what hope has Vista got? Let alone the 64bit versions.

The problem was seemingly simple. Just take one high-end PC, attach a big 1080p LCD screen to it and play some DVDs. If only it were that easy.

Region Free
For anyone living outside the US, one of the major bugbears is DVD region coding. Which makes the open sauce VideoLAN an interesting starting point. It's free, region free and does most things that you'd expect from a software DVD player. Unfortunately, it also does quite a lot of things that you wouldn't expect from a software DVD player making it something of an acquired taste.

The story could have ended there. VideoLAN works. But it's always best to check the competition and that led to an odyssey of pretty much every piece of DVD playback software on the market.

Playback Quality
The thing about a big 1080p screen is that it really shows up the quality of the DVD decoding and VideoLAN, good as it is, doesn't come close to the best of the commercial players. And the best that actually works on XP64 is WinDVD. The picture quality is stunning in comparison.

The Battle Over Coruscant scene from Star Wars III showed up several deficiencies with VideoLAN but none at all with WinDVD. Where VideoLAN hiccupped and had minor artifacts, WinDVD ran smoothly and every frame glistened. Some of the graphical differences were more subtle but, on a big screen, even subtle differences are magnified.

Problems
That should have been the end of the story but this is where Intervideo, the maker of WinDVD started to trip up. The first setback came with hardware acceleration. The test system has a nice new X1950XT-256 in it and WinDVD doesn't like it at all. Try to switch on hardware acceleration and WinDVD disappears in a puff of exceptions.

Then there's the fact that it doesn't like there being two screens hooked up to the system. If you want to play a DVD on the second screen, it has to be switched to Primary. Otherwise, WinDVD stuffs up horribly. And you'd better remember to switch the Primary back afterwards. It's a real pain.

Unfortunately, the pain doesn't end there. In attempting to get hold of Intervideo to report these problems and find out if there was a workaround, the firm's support turned out to be non-existent. Not good if you've just shelled out $40. Especially as you could buy a physical DVD player for that price these days.

Conclusion
There's little doubt that WinDVD 8 Gold would be an excellent buy if it worked properly. But it doesn't, and Intervideo obviously can't be bothered to provide any support either. Even the help system that comes with the software is full of screenshots from previous versions.

The only saving grace for WinDVD 8 Gold is that the competition is actually worse. µ