CyberLink PowerProducer 4

This Next Gen version of PowerProducer offers HD DVD (up to 15GB) and BD (Blu-ray disc; up to 50GB) authoring at up to 1,920 x 1,080 resolution (25Mbps MPEG-2). It also covers DVD, editable DVD±VR), SVCD, and VCD, and it offers 61 menu templates, many with motion. However, authoring options are drastically limited for at least BD: PP4 did not let you edit a BD menu at all.

Still, there’s just about every feature a beginning or intermediate home DVD maker will want, including options to fade out background music when the video ends and automatic pans and zooms for slideshows (although you have to create a slideshow in the included liteware Power Director Express 5 to apply this). PP4 also supports animated thumbnails with transparent frames in DVD menus, as well as first play video. There’s direct-to-disc and broad capture support, plus several Magic editing and image enhancement tools, including antishake and automatic video creators.

On the whole, PP4’s interface is simple, friendly, and relatively easy to pick up.

PP4’s Blu-ray capabilities was tested using Windows Vista Home Premium with a Sony BWU-100A and CyberLink’s Build 1311 patch. InterVideo WinDVD 8 Platinum wouldn’t play the disc, however, and neither app allowed a non-HDCP Radeon X850XT to decode it. PowerProducer 4 lets you make very basic BDs and HD DVDs along with very nice DVDs. It’s an early app for the blue laser formats, which are still a pain to work with on a PC, so keep things in
perspective before you buy.

[tags]CyberLink[/tags]