Multimedia software company CyberLink is at CES showing the latest versions of their applications, including PowerDVD 7 Ultra which was one of the first programs you could use to play back Blu-ray Discs on your PC. CyberLink was showing the latest update which allows your PC to become Profile 1.1 compliant.
Using the newly released Fox Blu-ray Disc of
Sunshine, the folks at CyberLink demonstrated how the PC can now be a fully functional Profile 1.1 Blu-ray player. The update changes the interface slightly: in addition to the standard play-skip-pause (etc.) buttons they have added the red, green, blue, and yellow buttons. The PC's hard drive is used as persistent storage. The movie played the Picture-in-Picture (PiP) material perfectly. CyberLink expects to have this update available (free to owners of PowerDVD Ultra) next month.
Another point of interest to people is that they confirmed that PowerDVD Ultra does play DTS-HD soundtracks. This has been a point of confusion since the actual logo does not appear on the box or splash screen. They also confirmed that a DTS-HD Master Audio update is coming as well, but could not give a timetable. Until then, you can enjoy the HD extension of those soundtracks for higher quality sound than normal (core) DTS Digital Surround.
Other products available from CyberLink include
PowerProducer 4 and
Power2Go 6 which allow people to author and burn Blu-ray Discs.
PowerDirector 6 can now capture and output High Definition formats. All these have been bundled together, along with PowerDVD, in
DVD Suite Ultra. People with HD camcorders now have a complete solution for capturing, authoring, burning, and playing back their home movies in Blu-ray format.
Of interest was CyberLink's
CyberLink Live. It allows people to stream videos, pictures, music and even retrieve documents remotely. They are even working on an update to allow people to remotely play their Blu-ray discs! Also shown was
Media Server which allows streaming from a PC to any DNLA device, including the
Sony PlayStation 3.
I would like to thank Manal Ma of CyberLink for showing me these great products that helps folks like us create our own Blu-ray Discs!