Alas, there’s no tag editing for photos or music files. The photo browser is top-notch and presents your images in calendar style according to the data taken.

PowerDVD also supports JPEG, BMP, TIFF (compressed and uncompressed), and PNG photos, and it offers some nice fades when you play a group as a slideshow. In my music tests, PowerDVD 14 played 5.1 surround, FLAC, WMA, MP3, OGG Vorbis, APE, lossless WMA, Apple lossless (new), M4A, and all types of wave files up to 96kHz/32-bits (the max my system supports).

PowerDVD 14 now also supports HEVC, the High Efficiency Video Codec-more on that in a bit. Audio track support includes AAC and 5.1 Dolby Digital. In my other codec support tests, PowerDVD 14 played AVI/PCM, DivX 5, DivX HD, MPEG 1/2/4, Xvid, most FLV, Quicktime, AVCHD, WMV, h.264, and OGG Theora. The only other issues I ran into were the inability to drag files from an archive directly to PowerDVD (VLC can handle this), and just the audio portion of certain FLV videos being played. A pre-release update mostly fixed this however, I still ran into instances where the program would seem to hang, especially at first run.

My initial encounters with PowerDVD 14 were frustrating, due to the way it handled background tasks such as media collection and network path scouting. PowerDVD’s 10-foot interface is much like Windows Media Center’s. There’s also a ten-foot interface for use from your couch with the aforementioned remote software.

The interface is handsome and well thought out, with the notably unintuitive exception of having to click on the fast forward icon to slow down a video. Normal playback includes hardware acceleration, but there’s also a CPU mode with TrueTheater enhancements which will make a lot of material-primarily DVDs-look more high-def. In terms of what you see on the screen, PowerDVD 14 is the best Blu-ray/DVD/video player out there.

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