News :: 15MR: Elecard DVD Player
Hello all and welcome today’s 15-Minute Review. Today’s application is Elecard DVD Player—a DVD player for playing back DVDs on your hard drive and in your DVD drive.
As Giveaway of the Day states:
“Elecard DVD Player allows you to play DVDs or media files from a directory of files copied from a DVD. The exclusive feature of the player is the ability to playback DVD folders and backup DVD contents (if Elecard DVD ripper plugin is installed).
Elecard DVD Player provides high resolution and full quality playback of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 SP/ASP and AVC/H.264 (if Elecard AVC PlugIn for DVD Player is installed) optimized for the most efficient CPU usage. The built-in MS DirectShow® decoders enable Elecard DVD Player to play a number of common multimedia formats, such as AVI, WAV, MP3, MOV etc.
Very stylish and intuitive interface, set of useful features, and competitive price make Elecard DVD Player a decent addition to your ‘must have’ list of applications.
Attention! CSS playback is not supported. CSS stands for ‘Content Scrambling System’. It is the data scrambling method used to garble the content of a DVD disc. If you are watching licensed DVDs, you don’t need deCSS feature.“
Quick Pros
- Nice interface – looks professional
- Fairly easy to use
Quick Cons
- Does not appear to playback direct from DVD drive
- Won’t let you playback until you set parental setting first time
- Does not automatically set aspect ratio
- Attempts to playback in Digital audio first – no audio
- Visual quality poor
Expansion
I was excited to go into this review. A $15.45 DVD player was a great idea. While you have to pay for the DVD ripping feature and other features on top of it, I don’t need those features. I opened the application, dug up the closest movie I had on DVD, and tossed in Fox & The Hound 2. I go to play it, and tells me I can’t watch it because of parental controls. So I go in and set the parental controls and hit play again. It stays black for a moment, shows the Disney logo looking very crappy, and crashes the whole app. Try loading it again, same thing again.
I go and grab Pirates of the Caribbean and try that. Nothing but black screen and no sound, but looks like its playing. Looks like its a case of no CSS playback afterall even though it was stated it could play directly from DVD player on Giveaway of the Day (Or at least that’s how it reads.)
I know it is outside the timeframe of the review, but since the application was ‘designed’ to run off of backup copies saved on the hard drive, I thought to make the review proper. I tossed in Kung-Fu Hustle, and tried to play. No luck, just black screen again. I had to figure out how to toss this onto my hard drive as the application needs. So after half hour and resorting to doing my Wedding DVD (Which I produced,) I got it over to meet the needs of the application. I go and load it and hit play. It plays, but no sound. What’s wrong. I check the settings. “Enable AC-3 S/PDIF output” is on. I turn it off and try playing again. Sound!
The video playback quality was poor; horizontal streaking and ribboning and blotching otherwise. I checked it in Beyond Media Player (I love my Firefly remote control FYI) and the file worked fine. The file was also a funny aspect ratio too; I came to realize this application does not do automatic aspect ratio. Think this is enough.
Final Verdict
A great concept, affordable price and would have been worth paying for considering the price of other software DVD players. However, unable to play Retail DVDs and really poor playback of hard drive files makes this an uninstalled application for me. After hunting the internet as well, the ripping features that are additional add-on ripping at only playback speed appears to be sub-par and overpriced. I would have paid $15.45 or more IF this worked. However, without working decently at all even when it worked, it isn’t worth it at this time.
Alternatives
Posted by BladedThoth on Thursday, February 15, 2007
