CyberLink PowerDVD Ultra

About CyberLink PowerDVD Ultra

PowerDVD is a playback application rather than a lightweight player, and the difference shows on material that other players stumble over. Optical discs play with their menus intact, high dynamic range material is tone mapped correctly for the display in front of it, and the format support covers the modern codecs alongside everything older that is still sitting on a drive somewhere.

The upscaling engine is the headline feature on the Ultra edition. Standard definition and high definition material shown on a much larger panel is sharpened and reconstructed rather than simply stretched, with edge handling that avoids the halo artefacts a naive upscale produces. The effect is most obvious on older archive material played on a modern display.

The library side turns a pile of files into something browsable. Media across local drives, attached storage and network shares is indexed into one collection with metadata, and playlists span sources rather than being tied to one folder. Playback resumes where it stopped even if the file lives on a share that was offline in between.

Output and casting cover the room as well as the desk. Audio passes through to a receiver in its original format for the surround formats that need it, the player streams to a television on the same network, and a phone can act as a remote. Playback settings like audio track, subtitle choice and aspect handling are remembered per title.

What is included in this build

• Optical disc playback with menus and chapters intact
• High dynamic range tone mapping matched to the connected display
• Upscaling engine reconstructing detail on lower resolution material
• Broad codec support covering modern and legacy formats
• Media library indexing local drives, attached storage and network shares
• Passthrough audio to a receiver for the surround formats that require it
• Streaming to a television on the same network with phone remote control
• Per-title memory of audio track, subtitle choice and resume position

Changed in version 24.0.1922.62

• Improved upscaling quality on heavily compressed sources
• Faster library indexing across network shares
• Additional hardware decode paths on current generation GPUs
• Better subtitle rendering on high density displays
• Reduced startup time with very large media libraries

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Close any other media player and disable real-time protection before starting.
2. Extract the archive to a short path on a drive with 5 GB free.
3. Run setup as administrator and accept the bundled codec components.
4. Choose which file types the player should associate itself with during setup.
5. Reboot once, then set the display and audio output configuration on first launch.

System requirements and file details

Frequently asked about this title