Windows Happy Fun Time with Cyberlink!

That's right kids, I bought a Blu-Ray Drive! But it turns out only one piece of software can run Blu-Rays, at least until the homebrew crew polish off VLC 2.0; there might be others, but I got a full Cyberlink application suite for free with the drive so damn it all, I was going to use it. For your delectation - my adventures with PowerDVD 8.



My mum had some friends over on sunday to watch Moon but only I had a copy and that copy was on BR, so I moved my tower to the living room and hooked it up via s-video cable (it's an adorably old TV). When I tried to play Moon, PowerDVD kept quitting to desktop. It had been running fine before now, but it had been a while since I'd used it - and that was the problem.

Grievance #1: PowerDVD 8 has to be fully patched before you can use it. It checks whether it's up to date or not online every time you run it and tells you to download patches (at least, it's meant to - see above).



I double-checked this because I couldn't quite believe it; I'd downloaded the patches in the past because I could, but now was not the time to be doing so. Surely you could still use it without them? No. I did try denying it network access, but then it just refused to do anything, quitting to desktop after 10 seconds no matter what I clicked - which also means that if you haven't activated it, no internet = no use, ever, even to check & change settings. And of course, activation requires the internet. So if you don't have the internet, you can't watch your Blu-Rays anything with it.

The patch was no paltry Steam-esque 15MB affair - it was 89MB. That's 25 minutes on my connection (assuming every customer has 20Mb broadband is unfair, frankly). After exploring a variety of other options, and swearing profusely under my breath (everyone was waiting to see a film) I downloaded it and tried to install it, which took an age (and this wasn't just due to my recent problems with the Windows Installer, it was simply the app itself; PowerDVD 8 and its peripheral applications and installers are horribly bloated.)

Grievance #2: it wasn't a patch, it was a full reinstaller of the latest release. They didn't bother to create a patch ladder like most software developers do; they just dumped the whole program into a self-extracting installer and forced all their customers to download it regardless. Interestingly, despite basically being a full new version (and behaving like one - see grievance #4), it still checks for and requires the older version, as I found when I tried to do a clean reinstall:



which means that whenever you reformat and want to reinstall PowerDVD 8, you have to go through a long train of installations comparable to the nightmare of installing World of Warcraft. Count download time too if you forget to keep all the update files. That's a lot of prep time just to watch some films.

Grievance #3, and here's where it gets really good: the activation splash screen was in Mandarin. My English-language version of PowerDVD forced me to download a new version of itself, then directed me to a Chinese-language version. Now, I don't read chinese. I'm not even sure it was Chinese, it might've been Korean or something similar. However, I could discern what it was asking for - a serial for activation.

Grievance #4: it asked me for a serial. This is a problem because I don't have a serial, because mine was an OEM bundle version that fills in the serial field for you. Unless you thought to write it down back then, you don't know what it is.



It didn't know any of this because, during the installation of the patch, it first totally uninstalled my older version and asked me if I wanted to keep my personal settings. Knowing from experience that it's better to start clean, I opted not to - and it erased not only my settings but also my registration and activation details.

This is an interesting thing for an incremental patch to do.

Anyway, I clicked what I hoped was 'register later' and continued, finally reaching a brick wall:

Grievance #LOL: it doesn't run properly under Windows 7. My swanky, updated, possibly-Korean PowerDVD 8-point-something doesn't work. I have tried every troubleshooting method I know and even tried reinstalling it (after the guests had watched a different film on DVD and left). I can only run it in XP SP3 compatibility mode. It crashes when I try to play a disc and lags horribly during file playback. The disc playback I now know to be activation-related: it won't play my Blu-Rays until I activate it. The rest is just incompatibility.

Post-Reinstallation Grievance: I cannot register it. This isn't an uncommon problem but PowerDVD has an oddity about it: it tells me I've registered, then tells me I haven't:





In an infinite loop. I have disabled every firewall and security parameter and simply cannot register it. I postponed this and it crashed to desktop.



I can't play my film because it isn't activated,
I can't activate it because I don't have a key for my OEM version,
I don't have the OEM key because the patch erased it,
I downloaded the patch because the software wouldn't let me play my films until I did.
Oh, and I can't register it because the server says no.

I could probably get it working eventually - and indeed, I probably will. (The break in the chain was not telling it to save my personal settings. With that, it will be activated, and activated, it may finally work - though I don't know this.) But the real point that I've taken away from this experience is that some software companies are utterly incapable of doing anything right.



Consider VLC. It was made by basement programmers with almost no financial incentive whatsoever, and it works perfectly; I mean, really exceptionally. It's free, light, tiny and (eventually, after a long history of tweaks) works very well. Compare that to PowerDVD8, a DRM-intensive, inefficient, difficult-to-run, impossible-to-please and ultimately non-functional piece of crap that was produced with the backing of a multi-million dollar[1] software company.

Again, I will get it working. Don't we always get these things working in the end? That's the quintessential experience of a PC enthusiast: having things finally work five hours, days or weeks after they were supposed to, and at a great cost in time and stress. I wasted two and a half hours* trying, non-stop, to play a film I paid for. I still haven't managed to. Had I kept the version I'd illegally downloaded prior to buying it, I'd have been able to watch it instantly. This is why even the good guys pirate sometimes: because some companies just abuse their paying customers at every turn.

*This is no exaggeration. I did a clean reinstall for the purposes of this post and it only took me 2 hours this time. It's half the installer's bloatedness and half the myriad of problems kicked up.

 

roid rage pirate xD

 

This is why I use Arcsoft Total Media Theatre (this, the wmc integration & the fact powerdvd won't play anything as I go through an avr)

 

Sigh... Been there have the tshirt. I upgraded to 10 shortly after getting 8 for free. Now when I install I have to go through 3 installs: 8, 10 and 10 upgrade. I just keep a copy of them on an external hdd to save me half a night of downloads. 10 was also about as stable as a psychotic hamster with 3 legs. Funny tho adding a second 5870 and 6gb ram fixed all my stability issues. I think this application is so badly optimised the only way to tame it is throw a bucket load of muscle at it!

 

Thank god, it's at least some comfort to know it's not just me.

I still haven't gotten it running. Fourth clean reinstall, did everything right, upgraded every driver, still crashes to desktop. Plays normal DVDs fine. And still can't register despite having the most open internet connection in the world.

 

nor just me, lol, i installed my hd5870 and havent been able to watch blurays either, i went from 7 to 8 to 9 then 10, all with upgrades, and yes it is a pain in the arse, because i couldnt just install 7 then upgrade to 10, i had to install 7 then 8 then 10.

i am in conflabb with cyberlink, at the moment and am awaiting a response from the files i sent them.

i will let peeps know when i get a result

 

weird I have the same suite came free with my BH10LS30 I run windows 7 ultimate 64bit and as yet Ive had no problems touch wood there must be a few buggy copies about im guessing

 

Wow, I had no idea how bad PowerDVD had become. I used it a while back (about 4 years ago) and hated it, but it worked. I've used VLC ever since, but thankfully I've never needed Bluray playback (No need for me personally), so VLC has been my staple ever since.

That's astonishing that a company can make such a bad product.

 

mine maybe a bug with the 10.7 catalyst drivers, but they worked with the hd4870 i had previously

 

They royally f-d PDVD up years ago with bloatware and moneygrabbing BS tbh. I only use it now since I have a press account on Cyberlink's site and can dl anything for free hehe.

Not that I ever use it though.

It's such a mainstream "good enough" product where next year you'll have to pay $50 for an upgrade to another half finished product.

 

I went trawling the cyberlink forums and recommendations on it were to try different install paths. People were using oem/retail/upgrade combinations to achieve varying results. It was blu ray that was the killer for me. It would never play blu ray just DVD on 8, blu ray worked but was intermittent on 10 till i beefed up my system and as a happy coincidence things stabilised. I then got a gtx280 physx card for which I used the official accidental 257.15 nvidia drivers to activate physx with my ati cards present. These required a dummy monitor to be set up on my system. When I upgraded from catalyst 10.5 to 10.6 powerdvd 10 stopped working altogether with the physx card enabled. I reverted to catalyst 10.5 which fixed the issue and decided to wait for catalyst 10.7 but again powerdvd wouldn't work with these and a physx card. I then removed the 257.15 nvidia drivers and used the newer ones with a third party patch to enable physx. This patch removed the need to set up a dummy display so I decided to try update to catalyst 10.7 again and hey presto powerDVD worked fine! It is one finicky program

 

Same here but i have only used it a couple of times as i rip all my blu-rays to HDD. I'm not sure if you can even watch a bluray through an s-video cable to your TV as i doubt power DVD removes the HDCP protection.

 

well i just tried removing all traces of catalyst driver to install 10.6, only to find it wouldnt install a driver for my card :s, so had to download driver, which then updated everything to 10.7, so that didnt work.

 

This is the way to do it, then use VLC to play it

 

cyberlink have told me that current 5800 series drivers don't support RGB Overlay. hence crash to desktop

 

Oh boy. I'm running a 4870 patched to 10.7 so they'll probably tell me the same...surely they're obliged to provide compatibility though? Normally it'd be kind of "meh", but this is the only way to play blu-rays as far as I know. If this doesn't work Samsung (and all other OEMs) are basically selling non-functional products.

edit -

Yes, I think I'll be trying that next...have to dust off my semi-legal ripping softwares at long last.

I love how, in every situation like this, I always seem to have my hand forced back to technically-illegal methods to get my legal purchases to work.

 

That's ****ing fail from AMD then

 

patched my version of PowerDVD when i went to blue-ray, and its constant dropping of the aero desktop really bugs me, also had to disable GPU acceleration because it would lag.

Lag on a GTX280, hmmmmmmmmmm its **** software

 

Query to tech support:

Response from tech support:

Guess I'd better get started.

 

Roflmao... It's like instructions to take out an engine to change a headlight bulb!

Hope you have overalls