14 DAY TRIAL // DVD playing software has advanced a lot lately and more and more applications have appeared on the market, promising to deliver everything you could ever want from such a software. Most of them are not successful into reaching the same video and sound quality as the two most appreciated programs on the market (Power DVD and WinDVD).
And almost all of them cost a fortune, compared to what they can give. Until now, I have found only one such application for free, and it did not meet the minimum standards. But FreeTime Soft has come out strong with a series pretty good DVD related softwares and a DVD player. The latter is the object of this review.
FreeTime Soft delivers WinX DVD Player at a price of $29.90. The developer also makes available a demo version that can be used for testing the application before buying it. Unfortunately, the demo mark is floating inside the video window nagging the user. Depending on what you use to watch your DVDs, you will judge for yourselves the utility of the DVD player.
The simple interface has become a visual mark of the FreeTime Soft company and the ease of use of the applications is an asset that not many other softwares can brag about. There are two skins, Default and Gray, available in the Setup menu under Skin Setup. A preview of the change is also available, so that you decide if one skin or the other is the one you want before applying it.
The richness of options is not WinX DVD Player's strongest point as the shallow setup menu offers only a Video Setup window. The users can make video control adjustments concerning the brightness, contrast, hue and saturation. Right under Video Control there are the Aspect Ratio Settings which comprise Fill Screen, Always 1:1 or customizing options that allow you to set the aspect ratio to the desired values.
As almost any other ordinary video player, our subject is also able to capture frames from the running video file. The snapshot's directory can be defined also in the Setup window. The default saving location is in the installed directory of the software. The options for ?snapshooting? allow the user to take an instance for every frame of the motion picture automatically or just pick a scene and take the picture by himself/herself. The instances will be displayed in thumbnail size in the snapshot window on the left. The extension of the saved files is .bmp.
Playlists are also supported by the software, so you can add some other files than the usual DVD video ones. From what I have noticed, the application supports the following file formats: DVD, VCD, SVCD, MP3, WMA, RMA, WAV, AVI, DIVX, WMV, RM, RMVB, XVID, MPEG1, MPEG2, VOB, DAT, ASF.
Another feature present in the application is creating bookmarks for your favorite parts of the video. The option's settings will also open in the left side of the video pane and it presents all the available bookmarks as thumbnails. Additional information is provided, like number of the chapter and time.
The playing options include all the regular actions: passing from one chapter to another, fast forward, rewind, pause, stop and play. An interesting feature that can be found in few similar softwares is the forward speed changing. The program can forward up to six times the normal playing speed by default, but you can adjust it to a maximum of 16 if you press the little running fellow to the left.
Volume control is placed on the right side of the playing controls and can be adjusted by simply dragging the slider to the right or to the left or by clicking on the + or ? signs.
The Good
No matter from which region the movie is, you will not have to change it, as the application will play it anyway.
The Bad
The lack of tooltips made the testing a bit difficult and I imagine that - although the interface is intuitive enough - some of the users will not handle it quite well. The lack of a proper Help menu (despite the fact that the software would not need one if it were for the tooltips) makes the use a bit cumbering.
Also, the presence of the demo mark is annoying enough to not use the player to watch a whole movie in the demo version. The price is also a bit high, considering that for $9 more you can buy the CyberLink's Real McCoy PowerDVD at a promotional Christmas price.
The Truth
I usually like the FreeTime Soft applications, but this one seems to be made in a hurry.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
