DirectDVD Reviewer's Comments
The "TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award" Winner, Direct DVD, is the latest DVD software produced by Orion Studios. This DVD player is an excellent product for playing DVD movies. Even at basic default settings this software offers excellent audio and video quality. The DirectDVD Theater Verb Processor simulates the cinema ambiance so well you'd swear you were at the movies.
DirectDVD offers a comprehensive feature set, including an on-screen mesh (see-thru) display of the elapsed play time and chapter number. DirectDVD offers a variety of formats for image-capturing, including jpg, tiff, bmp and ico. However, the program interrupts you each time you attempt to capture an image and the program does not automatically save the image to a folder. But DirectDVD will allow you to play the movie as your desktop background.
Ease of Use:
DirectDVD is easy to use. The only required steps include inserting a DVD movie into the player and pressing the play button.
Ease of Installation:
The setup and installation process for DirectDVD is a bit challenging. You will be required to enter a password and a user validation code before you can get the program up and running.
Video Quality:
DirectDVD's video quality is superb, but the program lacks additional video picture fine-tuning adjustments. The only adjustment factors available are standard contrast, brightness, and saturation controls. DirectDVD does offer various screen aspect settings, however, such as letterbox, crop, and fit-to-screen.
Audio Quality:
DirectDVD includes access to some excellent quality audio software (by download). This first-rate audio system is the most outstanding feature of the product. It offers a variety of additional audio plug-ins, contributing to outstanding audio diversity.
Help/Support:
DirectDVD provides excellent documentation in the software package. It delivers information about the product through a contents section, an index organized by individual topic, and through searches on particular topics. Each information segment provides valid data to help answer your questions. There is also an online FAQs section, email and phone support available.
Summary:
DirectDVD is one of the best players on the market for playing both DVDs and VDs (video disks). However, if you want to play VOB files from your hard drive or if you want to play DIVX videos, this is not the product for you.
