http://www.winferno.com

What’s it do?

PC Theater is advertised as delivering crystal-clear picture quality, full screen viewing, and high-definition Dolby audio when viewing DVDs.


Does it do what it promises?

Reviewer 1: PC Theater is a bare-bones, rudimentary media player that can play a DVD and not much else. It's been a long time since I tried out a program for $29.95 that delivered so little for the money. The Web site looks professional until you start reading what it says, like: "Whether it's a DVD you rent, buy from the store or make with your camcorder, PC Theater will play ALL DVDs." That's like advertising a car that you can drive on both city and country roads.

Reviewer 2: Not really. It does not recognize DVD on HD and the volume playback on my laptop is too weak to be useful to me.

Reviewer 3. Yes. The Web site gives a good description of the capabilities of this program. There is an animated tutorial that shows the functions of each of this program's controls. It is quite complete and gives a very good idea of what to expect.

Reviewer 4. Yes. It allows you to watch DVD's on your computer; although its statement that It delivers . . . amazing, cinematic sound quality is certainly hyperbole as is the statement that it will turn your computer into a full featured theater.

Reviewer 5: Yes, this application delivered on all promises made by the publisher: ease of installation and use as well as ease of access to the rich extended features, all of which ran very smoothly.

Reviewer 6: This program does play DVD movies on your computer. I tested it out on two different computers. On one, it works as advertised - that is, you fire up PC Theater, plug in a DVD, and away you go. However, I was not able to make it work easily on my own computer. For one thing, it requires that you have an updated version of Windows Media Player. Currently, Windows Media Player is in Version 11 (beta), but even with that on my system, PCTheater requires some effort to make it work.


Was it easy to install?

Reviewer 1: There were no problems installing, but there are some ambiguities in the End User License Agreement (EULA). It is very long and makes reference a large number of times in legal jargon to the phrase "third party". An analysis made using a EULA-analyzer returned a threat level of 5, meaning that there are probably not any dangerous things you agree to, but there remain some unclear points to the agreement.

Reviewer 2. Yes.

Reviewer 3. Installation was fast and simple.

Reviewer 4. Yes. While it was a sizeable 12.2MB download, it was a straightforward installation using a standard installation wizard; although, the GUI is so Spartan that you may at first believe the installation wasn't complete.

Reviewer 5. Yes very easy. Installation is a two-step process: first the program, then codecs, both provided in the single download.

Reviewer 6. It was relatively easy, although it would be helpful to know that you are embarking on two installation processes rather than just one. First, the program itself is installed. I was able to direct it to the location of my choice (very important for me to be able to do), and choose which shortcuts it would create. Then a completely new install began, from a different company altogether, with its own EULA (end users license agreement) and so forth. This was to install the "codecs" (the different compression systems used on DVD's and other video equipment) that PC Theater needs. All that said, though, the procedure is quite straightforward. You will need to restart your computer once the installation has finished.


Good points

Reviewer 1. Sorry, I can't see any good points, besides the fact that the application, indeed, plays DVDs. It is a very basic application. All the "beating of the breast" on the Web site says nothing and means nothing. The only good point I can see is that it works.

Reviewer 2. The video quality was sharp and clear.

Reviewer 3. This is a simple, self-contained program dedicated to playing DVDs on your computer. If you already know how to operate a DVD player, you already know most of what you need to run this program. As you would expect, it has on-screen buttons to control playing, stopping, pausing, fast forward and rewind, volume, and mute. More advanced controls are hidden unless you click on the button on the lower right corner which is labeled "Show/Hide Playlist". Controls found here include a parental controls setting to control the maturity level of programs allowed to be viewed. There is another control to set the speed at which you forward and rewind. You can also go into slow-motion viewing from another button found here

Reviewer 4. I asked my stepson, an independent film maker, to test this product with me because, as a film maker, he obviously has a great deal of video filming and editing expertise. I'll begin with his comments: This program did a good job of Pixel Doubling. One of the things that concern me most often as a film maker-especially when shooting a film in SD rather than HD-is what errors will occur when the SD image is stretched to HD resolutions, i.e. 720p or 1080i (or 1080p). While I am unable to tell to what extent PC Theater stretched the DVD images on the film project I used for my portion of this test, it did a very solid job of filling in the space between the DVDs' given lines of resolution when it stretched the image. For example, using the DVD of Kurosawa's The Last Samurai, the expanse of grass in the opening shot would be an area where lesser programs of this type would give a jagged line. Windows Media Player, as an example, did not handle this stretching of the image nearly as well and created a great deal more "noise." PC Theater dealt with stretching the image to the full screen very well. The Pixel Doubling did not cause any of the problems associated with stretching a moving image across a screen, such as: a grainy look caused by an inappropriate estimation of color by the program when filling in those gaps created when an image is stretched, jagged edges on thin straight lines which is especially noticeably on grass or chrome such as a chrome strip on a vehicle, a dimming of the image, and in worst cases a flickering or dropping of actual frames of the film. Even the most common problem associated with stretching or Pixel Doubling, an apparent loss of focus or what one might call a "soft focus," was not apparent with PC Theatre. In addition to the aforementioned, I that the Parental Controls were a nice option not generally found on standard media players such as Windows Media Player, Real Player, etc.

Reviewer 5: PC Theater has a neat and useful interface, an easy venue to select the various features which then offer drop-down menus as applicable. The audio is rich and sparkling, enhanced by Dolby 5.1. Passworded parental controls are provided - separately for each child if so desired, offering protection for those who need them. One may adjust settings for wide-screen display; full -screen mode from which one can return with a simple double-click. There are standard fast- forward options of 2x, 5x or 10x, as well as a "chapter" feature that is read off the DVD at the beginning of appropriate segmental intervals and can be quickly accessed. The screen shot capturing capability is fun and maybe even has practical applications. These are some of the advanced features provided in addition to the "standard" features one might expect of a player. I found no clashes between it and any of the many and varied applications I run concurrently.

Reviewer 6. Although PC Theater is really quite a simple program to run, they do offer a couple of demo movies on their Web site. Apart from being helpful, you can get a good feel of the program by watching them. As mentioned above, I was successful with PC Theater on one of the computers that I tested it on. Due to the difficulties that I was having on my own computer, I contacted the support staff with my problems. Support is available by clicking on a link in the help file. After you have looked through the FAQ's (frequently asked questions) and "Knowledge Base" files on their PC Theater's Web site, you can submit a "ticket" with your question. Their response to my request was very quick, and they did all that they could to help out. Eventually, they offered to refund me the purchase price of the program. However, since I am able to run the program successfully on a different computer, the issue is more likely to do with a problematic computer than with the software itself. The program also offers the possibility of defining "parental controls". In this way, each person who uses PC Theater on the computer will be able to watch the programs defined as appropriate for them, based on the MPAA ratings. This can be done either with predefined groups (preschool, preteen, teen, etc.) or they can be customized individually. There is a movie on the Web site that explains this procedure, and there are good instructions in the help file


Weak points

Reviewer 1. There are all sorts of weak points. First of all, the program is a rip-off, considering the fact you pay $29.95 and get an extremely slimmed down DVD player when you can get a copy of Windows Media Player for free anyway. If you believe all the "fluff" on the Web site, you're in for a surprise. Sure, Dolby 5.1 Surround is great, but support for that is nothing that is exclusive for PC Theater. The codec for Dolby 5.1 is included in the latest version of Windows Media Player also. Codec is an abbreviation for Coder-Decoder. It's an analog-to-digital (A/D) and digital-to-analog (D/A) converter (software) for translating signals from an analog source to digital, and back again. So that's no big deal. You can get that for free. But in order to hear surround sound of this caliber, you have to have a special sound card (Don't even try to think you can get this quality from a laptop) with special hardware connectors for all the speakers. And if you buy such a sound card, you undoubtedly also get some really good media software included in the price, software that is far superior to PC Theater. And if you don't want to use that, you can use Windows Media Player instead. Other features such as parental control are also available on other DVD players, including, of course, Windows Media Player. What are left are very basic controls, such as Play, Fast Forward, Stop, Pause, Slow Motion, etc, along with Volume and Eject. You can bring up a play list of tracks and switch between chapters and scenes like in every other DVD player, but there are not very many menu items at all compared to Windows Media Player, which has dozens of features compared to PC Theater. You quickly get the hang of the sparse, but not very user-friendly interface. You can look at a film in both window and "full screen¨, but it is unclear how the full screen is produced, i.e. how much picture quality is lost due to the "expansion" of the graphics. You also can't dynamically change the size of the viewing window. It's either a medium fixed-sized size window or a large one, nothing user-adjustable in-between as in standard Windows programs. If you choose "stretch to fill" you get a larger window, but the quality is, well, "stretched" so to speak. Sound quality also seems to be weak. I couldn't raise the volume to the level I wanted, compared to other media programs installed on the same computers.

Reviewer 2. PC Theater will not play DVD on HD, that is a movie folder containing all the VOB and related files as they exist on a DVD disc. It claims to implement several audio enhancements, but from my experience, it is at the expense of volume. The DVDs I tested (with my all of my laptop's audio settings at max and PC Theater's volume at max) were either too soft to hear or just audible enough to enjoy the movie. I noticed no better sound quality that I'd get from Windows Media Player; but perhaps that was because I couldn't hear anything very well. I tried three movies with some small variations in the sound volume: The Thomas Crown Affair - almost no audio - the sound of the DVD drive was louder than the movie; The Cheap Detective - a mono sound-tracked movie that did play loud enough to hear, but only in a quiet environment' and, The Bonfire of the Vanities - also played fairly well with all volume controls at maximum. Note: The help file alludes to being able to capture screenshots; but the icon (of a camera) was not present among the other buttons.

Reviewer 3. I found no major problems with this program. The following are minor features the programmers may wish to include in future versions: The help feature is a bit difficult to find. It is up in the right corner with the screen maximize/minimize/close buttons, but requires looking around the screen before it is found the first time. Adding a second, more prominent help button would be nice for the first-time user. No use is made of the right mouse button. This would be a nice place to enable a menu of controls. As I went to make settings adjustments, I continually found myself right-clicking on the screen, expecting a settings menu to come up. I found it less convenient to click on a small button to open a side screen, to click on another small button to open a menu, and finally select my menu item with the third click. Finally, it would be nice if PC Theater would remember your settings from the last use when it is restarted. I prefer to watch full screen mode, but each time it restarts in "normal" (small)) screen mode even though the "stretch to sides" mode button is still highlighted. I have to go through the menus again each time to reset my preferred viewing settings.

Reviewer 4. The sound as a whole seemed a bit "dimmed" or muted-something I find common with Dolby filtering as this filtering often, in removing "noise", also tends to remove some of the high end frequencies. It did, however, work well with a Logitech Surround Sound System with which it was used. We found that the program had difficulty fully recreating the sound on an Adobe created DVD created by my stepson (as did Windows Media Player but not, surprisingly, Real Player), and there was no information available to know what sound "styles" this program works with. Is it compatible with THX or 5.1 (the Web sites claims "up to 5.1" so does this mean it works with 5.1 or not?), or if it converts everything to stereo? As I stated earlier, the program has maybe one of the most Spartan interfaces I have ever seen. Basically, you have a screen with a control bar that is limited to Play, FF, RWD, Chapter Skip, and Volume. This is hardly the same as "works just like your remote control" as claimed by the developer unless you are using a remote control from another era! While there was no reason to contact support, the only support offered is unfortunately the minimum email contact with a statement that "we generally respond to all emails by the next business day." I always find that word "generally" to be troubling as it means nothing specific and simply allows an excuse for untimely support response. The standard price of $39.95 and even the discounted price of $29.95 seem excessive for a program that offers little more than Windows Media Player or any of the standard media players such as Roxio, etc. that come prepackaged with most PCs today. PC Theater offers a slightly improved resolution as mentioned above but that comes at a pretty high price at the current pricing of this program.

Reviewer 5. Once having easily familiarized myself with the program, I found no compelling weaknesses or problems. The program seems very well thought out, though it has limited application. I do wish that the play capabilities included reading directly from a file rather than being limited to DVD play. I do not believe it has a capability to be used on a portable player-only device, although I have not attempted this. All of the literature makes reference to computer play only.

Reviewer 6. This program is designed to do one thing, and it does this quite successfully. So, in and of itself, I found very little to criticize. I do think, however, that if this is intended to be used in a family context, (the parental controls feature suggests that families would be an important market) a family considering this kind of program would be unlikely to have only one computer. Thus, the policy of allowing the program to be installed on only one computer is not realistic. It would be much better to follow the lead of some other software developers that are allowing one user to install it on, for example, a home computer, a laptop computer and perhaps one work computer.


Other comments

Reviewer 1. I cannot see any value in this program at all when you can get a far better one for free. The only users who might benefit from this program might be PC-challenged users who only want (and are able to use) the most basic or simple features and nothing else.

Reviewer 2. This program is not very practical for me on my laptop. The manufacture advertises this program especially for laptops for its portability. It fails to live up to its claim. I don't think I'd be able to hear anything if I were to use this on an airplane, for example. I have several other DVD players that do not exhibit the volume problem I had with PC Theater.

Reviewer 3: If you do not have a DVD player on your system, this is a fine choice; otherwise, it will probably be hard to justify this additional purchase. On my Dell Inspiron 8600, Cyberlink Power DVD is the DVD player installed by default. The quality of the picture on the same hardware, was better (sharper and crisper) with PC Theater. Counterbalancing that somewhat were greater control over languages, subtitles and sound settings in the Cyberlink program. Another feature Cyberlink had which PC Theater does not is an on-screen indicator which shows how far into a chapter you are viewing. I could not detect a noticeable difference in the sound quality from either program on the hardware I was using (through the laptop speakers or through external Yamaha speakers with subwoofer).

Reviewer 4. I really do not see any real advantage to using this software program. The "enhanced Dolby sound" as with any sound enhancement is always first limited by the quality of the speakers reproducing the sound. The enhanced picture, while offering better resolution, is still limited by the quality of the monitor on which you are viewing the image as well as the quality of your video card. Thus, I simply can't recommend paying for software that offers only a little more in resolution than those media players which are free. And please, watching a movie on your monitor-be it a 17 or 21 or 25 inch monitor is not, under any sense of the meaning, like having "front row seats" in a theatre as claimed by the developer. Watching films on your wide screen, plasma TV is not like having the best seats in the house. My suggestion? Save your $39.95 and go to the cinema where you can see a film as a director intended it: uncropped, unformatted, unedited, and with an audience. Film is, after all, a communal art form; not a solitary one.

Reviewer 5. Everything described by the publisher is delivered in a highly functional fashion. PC Theater is a sophisticated and quality computer-based media player that is best appreciated when used in a surround sound or home theater setting. I was able to test PC Theater in a multiple, quality speaker setting even though I myself do not have one. I did this segment of testing by temporarily installing PC Theater on a friend's system from a pen drive. The sound was great using multiple channels

Reviewer 6. Apart from the parental controls, I am not really sure what advantage this program has over Windows Media Player, particularly since Windows Media Player is needed for PC Theater to function. It is true that PC Theater does specialize in DVD Movies. Windows Media Player does all things video and audio so it can be busy and confusing. In that sense, PC Theater is simple, clear and uncluttered. As such, it might be worth the current price of $19.95, subject, of course, to the criticism mentioned above.


Will you continue to use it?

Reviewer 1: No.

Reviewer 2: No.

Reviewer 3. Yes.

Reviewer 4. No.

Reviewer 5. Until PC Theater adds independent player-only capabilities, probably not. Also, since I do not have quality speakers, surround sound, or a home theater, I don't see much personal benefit. Visual enhancement can be otherwise obtained. This application would seem to have strong appeal to a niche market into which I don't presently fit.

Reviewer 6. Perhaps, but only rarely.

 

OPERATING SYSTEMS USED IN THIS REVIEW
Windows XP Pro, XP Home

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