Angry with Power DVD

9designs2

9designs2

9designs2

Soldato
Joined
5 Jan 2003
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Somewhere in the middle
Here's the story in brief, I have a BD player in the PC, I bought P-DVD Ultra 7 at the time to play movies. It is patched up to date, and has worked fine.

This morning I thought I would try the latest copy of T2, Skynet edition, Guess what, won't play, need an update.....

BUT, looks V7 is no longer being patched, as Version 8 and 9 have since come out....... Oh look, I can have an "upgrade"..... but still they want about 40 quid, for something I have already paid for once !
I don't need extra features, just want to watch the basic movie.....what sort of "standard" is this if every few months you have to buy updates just to watch a film !?!?!?..........

Can I get anything better/free or do I have to become a victim of the system and pay the 40 quid upgrade ?
 
The last stable update they did was last year. If you download the latest update via Power DVD itself (5105_TaRe42_DVD090217-02)
it crashes once installed in XP & refuses to install in Vista & Win7.

Only way I found to get the latest discs to play is to install AnyDVD HD & keep your existing software, don't bother updating that until you need to.
 
I was having similar problems as well. I switched to Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 3 and everything works much better. Used to have to do so many workarounds to get PDVD 7 working :mad:
 
It gets worse, Ver9 release1501 worked, (borrowed from a friend !!!) but a patch was available, updated it to latest 2029, Now it doesn't work anymore.... Installing and going back to 1501 now doesn't work either..... So if I had of paid for the update, I would still not of had a working player...... complete toilet !..... Now downloading the trial from ArcSoft, cheers for the suggestion. Sorry to say Cyberlink have lost my custom.
 
so this means that anyone still with HD-DVD's and a drive will be unable to play some of the newer BD disks without updating to V8 or V9 that don't support HD-DVD's (well V8 does with the hack but I found it didnt work too well)

May be time to try TotalMedia Theatre 3....
 
PowerDvd is by far the worst piece of software I've ever had the mispleasure of using. It's slow, buggy and constantly bugging me to register or pay for an upgrade. The audio randomly switches to two channel audio forcing a reinstall, it crashes when the Blu-Ray disc is too complex and the keyboard controls disappear five minutes into a movie. All of these issues are well discussed online without solution.

If I didn't need it to play Blu-Rays, it'd be exorcised off my disk. If I ever win the lottery I'll pay the licensing fees for Blu-Ray so the open-source community could show Cyberlink how it's done.
 
I had problems with power DVD in the past but managed to fix it but i ownt suggest you copy what i did as it only fixed mine from a update bug where i could not update. Anyway i got 8 and 1 day it wouldnt update throwing all sorts of errors i forgot what. what i did to fix mine was use reg edit and delete all things related to power DVD and cyberlink. I then did a fresh install and it worked fine.


Now time to be a critic about power DVD. Cyber link really should be taken to court on what they do as when you buy something it should just work not have a new version every year and force you to update. there has been a lot of posts abou them saying that each time theres a update things are removed from older version but unknown if this is true as i got 8 i guess i will have to wait to 10 before i find if its true but anyway i really dont like the way some of the bluray companys treat people and it seems that unlike DVD which just works bluray needs speacial softweres and things that are never free. anyway thats my rant really wish when you buy a product it would work for atleast a wile and not have to be forced to update or have some kind of softwere that if you dont it disables you being able to enjoy softwere you paid for.
 
Leviathan said:
I had problems with power DVD in the past but managed to fix it but i ownt suggest you copy what i did as it only fixed mine from a update bug where i could not update. Anyway i got 8 and 1 day it wouldnt update throwing all sorts of errors i forgot what. what i did to fix mine was use reg edit and delete all things related to power DVD and cyberlink. I then did a fresh install and it worked fine.


Now time to be a critic about power DVD. Cyber link really should be taken to court on what they do as when you buy something it should just work not have a new version every year and force you to update. there has been a lot of posts abou them saying that each time theres a update things are removed from older version but unknown if this is true as i got 8 i guess i will have to wait to 10 before i find if its true but anyway i really dont like the way some of the bluray companys treat people and it seems that unlike DVD which just works bluray needs speacial softweres and things that are never free. anyway thats my rant really wish when you buy a product it would work for atleast a wile and not have to be forced to update or have some kind of softwere that if you dont it disables you being able to enjoy softwere you paid for.
Click to expand...

no different from totalmedia theatre 2 > 3. you had to pay for that too.
 
I don't mind paying for major updates, where i am after extra function and feature, BUT NOT to simple make it work, ie play the film. If some of the new features didn't work, but the film did, that would be my choice.
To be frank, this will hurt them more than me, as is it any surprise P2P sites are so popular !!!!... I'll pay for what works, I won't for rubbish and a con that doesn't......
Software isn't free, nor is loyalty !!!!.think that makes it 1-1......Rant over.
 
PDVD8 works fine for me up to a certain patch - go slightly higher than that version and it crashe4s all over the shop. Go to version 9 and it even refuses to load without throwing up error messages.

Happens with demo version and the paid for version...

WinDVD is much more stable - but I hate the interface and is a pain for multiple audio outputs....
 
9designs2 said:
I don't mind paying for major updates, where i am after extra function and feature, BUT NOT to simple make it work, ie play the film. If some of the new features didn't work, but the film did, that would be my choice.
To be frank, this will hurt them more than me, as is it any surprise P2P sites are so popular !!!!... I'll pay for what works, I won't for rubbish and a con that doesn't......
Software isn't free, nor is loyalty !!!!.think that makes it 1-1......Rant over.
Click to expand...

lol. now you know why i dont use my pc or laptop for watching films on the big screen :p
 
That's the problem with AACS, every time a decryption key is discovered software players need to be updated when a new decryption key is used. PowerDVD markets this forcing you to pay for upgrades every now and again.

My solution: AnyDVD HD + MakeMKV + VLC = Win :D.
 
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I have a BR drive sitting in my HTPC doing absolutely nothing. I got so sick and tired by software and hardware issues that i went out and bought a Sony BDP-S350. It's using firmware that is 2-3 from being the latest, and guess what? It still plays every disc i try perfectly.
 
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