I abandoned PDVD12 Ultra a while ago in dissatisfaction and went back to PDVD11 Ultra, but I'm giving it another go. There are a few shortcomings, though. I'm running 12.0.2625.57 on Win7 x64 Home Preium, with 8GB of RAM, an Intel 4-core i5 CPU, and an ATI Radeon HD 5700 graphics card with 2GB of onboard RAM.

Is it just my system, or is the screen rewrite in PDVD12 just generally very sluggish? When going from a window on the desktop to full-screen, and also going back from full-screen to a window, the image changes to the PowerDVD splash screen, and takes more than a second to rewrite with the image of the video that's playing. This happens with both DVD and Blu-ray. Is there a solution to this? Nothing like it happens in PDVD11.

Also, PDVD12 defaults to wanting to open files from an established media library, even when I intentionally didn't create one. I just want to be able to open the disc in my disc drive — why should that be so hard? Instead, PDVD12 opens as soon as the disc starts to be read, DVDFab Passkey decrypts the disc (removing region coding) then hands it off to PowerDVD12, which launches an error saying something like, "PowerDVD is already running, and you cannot launch a new session while the first one is still open". Okay, so I dismiss the error ... but wjhere's the simple menu item to tell PDVD12 to open the disc and play it? There isn't one.

Like most overambitious but poorly designed software interfaces, PDVD12 is only designed to let you do easily what the coders decided you "should" be doing. Why is it so bloody hard to simply play a disc? Isn't that what the software was originally for?

How do I switch off the tentacles that want to infiltrate and control anything even vaguely multimedia on my entire system?!