"On the video playback side of things, the first item you'll probably want to enable is hardware acceleration, with Cyberlink supporting NVIDIA, ATI and Intel GPU acceleration for both DVD and Blu-Ray media. With hardware acceleration enabled, you have a few different colour profiles to choose from to suit your display and surroundings. Speaking of video output, HDMI 1.3 and all that entails is also supported by PowerDVD 9.

However, eschewing hardware acceleration does instead allow you to make use of Cyberlink's own, CPU-based, "TrueTheater" effects, which gives you control over sharpness, brightness and motion smoothing. One nifty ability of these TrueTheater affects is the ability to display them as either a side-by-side or "split-screen" comparison, so that you can see what your video looks like both before and after said effects are applied."