CyberLink PowerCinema 4 on its way

DROPPING BY CyberLink Corp. this afternoon, it's perhaps best known for its PowerDVD DVD software player, it seemed to have just been informed that it had won two Computex Taipei 'Awards' the Computex Best Choice and Computex Buyers Choice.

CyberLinks cute 'PR Specialist' Renee Chan seemed positively ecstatic at this, so how could I refuse a demo of the forthcoming product that's being readied to replace its PowerCinema 3, which won the “Computex Buyers Choice” award.

'PowerCinema' is basically a software application that sits on top of normal Windows XP, Home or Professional, and turns it into a remote controlled Digital Entertainment Centre. It provides a very simple interface for the playback of DVD movies, video files, CDs, MP3s and sideshows of your photos, any of which can be imported from any storage device on your PC. It also seems to integrate with a TV tuner and provides easy recording and easy burning direct to CDs and DVDs.

So, what's new about its forthcoming PowerCinema 4? The first thing that strikes you is its cool '3D' user interface, where menu's and options slide into, and towards you. With version 4 both DVD's and TV signals can benefit from CyberLinks' 'Eagle Vision' (CLEV) which is a feature grabbed from it's PowerDVD software. CyberLink say 'CLEV' intelligently adapts video contrast and colours across the scenes in a movie to deliver superb and rich details and it seems to work, producing a more vivid, realistic image.

Another acronym, CLPV (CyberLink Pano Vision) also now works with TV images as opposed to just DVD movies, and CyberLink says this “is a new non-linear stretching technique, that can display 4:3 films on widescreen displays (and vice versa) with very little distortion”.

TV tuner support is also extended to accommodate digital as well as analogue transmissions.

CyberLink says that PowerCinema 4 should support all TV tuners based upon the Connexant Fusion 878 ASIC (formerly know as a 'Brooktree BT878').

The improved photo sideshow function deserves special mention, not just because PowerCinema 4 introduces an animated zooming effect which makes looking at your photos much more interesting, but because there's also the facility to remove 'red-eye' from images. Excellent! And during the demo all this was handled by a single simple remote control.

We were told we were shown a pre-Alpha version and frankly even at this stage, overall we were pretty impressed. It's simple straightforward to use, and I'd be surprised if even my mother couldn't use it.

CyberLink says that PowerCinema 4 will be available at the end of July, early August this year.

For around $60 retail it looks like a better proposition to me than Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition which seems only available for newly purchased PCs anyway.

Dell and Packard Bell seem to agree as, we're told, each bundles PowerCinema 3 on its consumer PCs, branding it as 'Dell Media Experience' and 'Packard Bell Power Cinema' respectively.