HomePage 6 of 24: Archive: What's new in version 2.5.5 Build 0620
Note : This is an archived review for an older version of PowerDVD. For the latest review, please refer to this page.
NEW in 2.5.5 Build 0620
Click here to read a brief of what's new in this release.To see a complete review of the latest version of PowerDVD, please refer to this page.
Unlike build 0202, this build release adds a few more features, in particular, with the Pan-scan implementation. There are also some other notable additions, which is described in detail below.
The first notable addition is the Pan-scan support. If you don't know what it is, Pan-Scan is basically a PowerDVD mechanism that allows you to watch widescreen movies as full screen titles (by zooming in) and you can manually "pan and scan" and picture by using your mouse to physically drag the picture left and right.
Although this feature was present in earlier releases, it was only available for anamorphic (16:9) enhanced movies - you could not use this feature with standard widescreen movies. With this new build, support for widescreen non-anamorphic movies has been added, meaning that you can now view any DVD movie in glorious full-screen - although most DVD die hard fans would never watch a movie that wasn't in the original theatrical aspect ratio.
As you can see, only the standard 2.35:1 and 1.85:1 aspect ratios are supported - fortunately, most DVDs fall into either of these 2 aspect ratios.
Second, there is now limited support for Microsoft HID interface for keyboards with multimedia buttons. This is kind of cool since if you have one of those keyboards with play, stop, pause ... buttons on them, you can now control PowerDVD using these buttons - this support is said to have been only tested under Windows Millennium RC version at the time of released.
The other changes/additions are not so obvious. There is the improved Motion Compensation and subpicture alpha blending support for nVidia GeForce2 GTS version - a important addition given the popularity of GeForce cards these days.
Also added is 4-channel Dolby Digital output support for sound cards using ESS Allegro.
The next new feature is the inclusion of DTS pass-thru for a wide range of sound cards (including the SB-Live range and some Aureal cards - see the what's new document for more information)
The last of the major new changes is a bug fix to do with detection and support of Enhanced 3DNow! instructions on Athlon/Duron processors.
