Videos on TV Deluxe enables you to create a fully customizable slideshow containing your favorite videos and background music, plus a personalized selection of filters, special effects and transition effects that can add the final touch to your composition. The whole process is really easy to complete, even for people that have never used a similar tool.

The program's interface is divided into several areas: one displays the folder structure on your system so that you can select the content you want to include in the slideshow; another one displays the video selected at that very moment; and finally the timeline is where you can drag and drop everything you want to add to the slideshow. There's also a built-in player that lets you preview effects and animations, as well as the slideshow in itself while you're working on it. The good thing is that you can work not only with the video files you store in your hard drive, but also with videos imported right from your video camera and even Youtube videos.

Videos on TV Deluxe includes a ton of special effects, filters and transition effects to spice up your presentation. Once finished, you can export the slideshow to high quality video (with an impressive range of available formats) or record it directly to DVD. The only drawback is that the file weighs more than 400 MB, meaning it takes a while to download and run, and it's quite heavy on system resources.

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Far from being just office workhorses, computers are also thought of as complete entertainment systems that you can use to chat with friends, play videogames or watch movies. Regarding this last option, there's a wide range of DVD players out there, but we'll focus our attention on one of them: Power DVD.

The program's installation process is very quick. It includes Google Toolbar as an add-on but you can decline its installation if you're not interested. Once launched, you gain access to its main interface which, to be honest, is not especially nice: a close-up of a girl wearing weird sunglasses is not the kind of thing you expect to see on the screen when opening a DVD player. It would look much better with some abstract design or just the program logo instead. Anyway, configuration settings allow you to customize this interface with skins but there are no skins included. At least you can change the color scheme by clicking on the display.

Power DVD is generally very easy to use. All the buttons on the player panel have tooltips to give you hints about their usage. Also, most of their functions can be performed with the mouse or the keyboard (using the hotkey displayed in the tooltip). When playing a movie in full screen mode, the panel hides automatically and shows only if you move the mouse. Still, you can access all the program's functions through a comprehensive context menu by right-clicking anywhere on the image.

As for the playing functions, the movie flows very smoothly even when you move the window around or play it in full screen mode. Sound can be configured in different ways, depending on your hardware means (from headphones to an 8-speaker surround system) in order to obtain the best possible sound quality. During our tests, we also found some interesting tools: one offers the possibility to change playing speed and therefore obtain slow or fast motion images; another one lets you take snapshots of your favourite scenes in the movie, according to the settings in Configuration – Player – Advanced - Snapshot; and finally a tool called "Say it again" with which you can repeat certain dialogues over and over again. This may be useful for foreign language students or movie fans who like to learn certain script lines by heart.

Power DVD is then a perfect solution for your all DVD playing needs. It may seem quite simple at first sight but after all, you don't need much more apart from "play" and "pause" to happily watch a movie on your PC. And in case you want to know more about the program and their developers, have a look at our interview with Dr. Jau Huang, Cyberlink's founder.

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While the audio technology behind DVDs and computer speaker systems has improved greatly over the last few years, the applications designed to play DVDs on your PC are often less advanced. AVS DVD Player has been designed with this factor in mind. It aims to ensure that you get the maximum benefit from any surround sound or multi-channel soundtracks that your films have.

AVS DVD’s interface is typical enough, although it does include a handy shortcut button which lets you burn the file you are watching to a DVD. The program also distinguishes itself with an inbuilt set of codecs that will play most files, meaning you don’t have to trawl the internet for the right decoder just when you want to watch a movie. AVS is really flexible, supporting all the regular DVD and DivX formats but also Real Media, Quicktime and 3GP (mobile video) formats. It’s sound processing where AVS really excels, however, and if you’ve got a decent set of surround sound speakers, you’ll really notice the difference. AVS DVD includes a surround equaliser which distributes sound according to your setup. Currently, this multi-channel surround sound feature supports 3.1, 5.1 and 7.1 speaker configurations.

There is a price to pay, however, for this emphasis on sound. Unfortunately, AVS DVD player is hindered by several basic flaws. Firstly, it’s very heavy on resources. Even if you own a machine with a high-end processor and graphics card, you’ll notice that AVS hogs your CPU power, so it’s advisable to close absolutely every other application to prevent your system from becoming unstable. One technical drawback is that it does not de-interlace images. This means that if you’re watching torrents or DivX files taken from TV shows, you could experience poor image quality, especially around the borders of the screen. This is due to the image resolution in TV broadcasts which operate at a lower frequency than those made for DVD.

Another annoying problem is that you can’t make the playback controls stay visible on the screen in full playback mode. You end up having to return to a smaller viewing window to control the film you are watching. This is not an issue if you just plan on watching a film from start to finish but it is if you plan to stop and start it a lot. One other minor issue is the lack of extra skins available. The black default skin looks great and there are a few more to choose from but nowhere near as many as other players such as WinDVD.

For a totally free DVD Player, AVS is not a bad product and it certainly looks good. However, as many users report, the developers seem to have focused too much on design and sound features than the bread and butter of usability. Nevertheless, if you’ve got a serious sound system or want to feel the full thrilling sound of your films, it’s certainly worth a try.

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BlazeDVD is a full-featured and easy to use DVD, Video CD, Audio-CD and media file player. It can provide superior video and audio (Dolby) quality, together with other enhanced functions: e.g. record DVD, optional skins, playback image and DV, image capture and bookmark, etc. Furthermore, it supports DIVX, MPEG4, RM, QuickTime, WMV, WMV-HD, MacroMedia Flash and popular media formats of Internet. BlazeDVD can be extensively compatible with hardware, which is operated stable, smoothly under Windows 98\98SE\Me\2000\XP system.

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BlazeDVD is a full-featured and easy to use DVD, Video CD, Audio-CD and media file player. It can provide superior video and audio (Dolby) quality, together with other enhanced functions: e.g. record DVD, optional skins, playback image and DV, image capture and bookmark, etc. Furthermore, it supports DIVX, MPEG4, RM, QuickTime, WMV, WMV-HD, MacroMedia Flash and popular media formats of Internet.

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PMM - Pocket Movie Master can convert various video to Windows mobile device playable WMV movie files, which could be played by Microsoft Windows Mobile devices, such as Windows Pocket PC, Smartphone or WindowsCE devices.

It is a converter, including convert from Mpeg2, DVD (VOB, mpeg), Mpeg1, VCD (DAT), AVI (AVI), Mpeg4 like 3ivx, Divx, h.264, Real Media file (RM, RMVB, RAM)...­etc, actually it can convert any video file to WMV if the source video can be play with Windows Media Player on your PC. By installing the correct codec or decoder you can convert any future video formats like HD-DVD or Blu-ray.

It can resize the video resolution to mobile size, reduce video and audio bitrate to fit your mobile's CPU, and reduce the result video WMV file size. Change video frame rates. Users can even choose the audio with mono or stereo in the target file which reduce file size, if your Pocket mobile device does not need stereo playback. User can choose any segment of the source file to be converted, clip the only needed parts. Practice or test only a few minutes before converting the whole video is possible.

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