A Few Oddities

When playing back a disc that has Dolby TrueHD, the on-screen display notifies me that it is only decoding Dolby TrueHD in stereo, but it's most definitely playing back in discreet 5.1 channels, and not outputting some form of stereo to be played back as pro logic on my Logitech Z5500's.

Changing audio tracks on a Blu-ray disc on the fly results in a slow down of the picture, causing stuttering for roughly ten seconds whilst the disc finds its feet. This could be my Lite On drive, but I somehow doubt it. DVD discs do not have the same problem.

According to the press release, version 8 now supports the output of Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD MA, although I lack the hardware to confirm this.

Moving from Blu-ray, I then went to see if there had been any improvements to HD-DVD. I inserted my demo disc of choice - Hot Fuzz. I was surprised to see a 'no disc in drive' error. I ejected the disc and tried again. Same error. I then tried Batman Begins. Same error. I then began thinking that my relatively new HD-DVD add on drive was on the blink, but I decided to check the CyberLink forums to see if any other users were having the same problem. And they were.

HD-DVD support is completely gone.

To say I was surprised was an understatement. Again, I am waiting to hear from CyberLink on the issues behind this, but the good news is that if you really need HD-DVD playback you can still run PowerDVD 7, con-currently with 8.