BlazeDVD

There is no shortage of media players on the Internet, but it may not be easy to identify one that meets your demand. Besides playing your DVD movies, you can use BlazeDVD to play other popular media formats, take screenshots, record movies and much more. It offers an excellent playback quality, thanks to its support for Dolby Pro Logic II/DTS.

It takes less than a minute to install the player and you will not encounter any confusing options along the way. It works smoothly on both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. The system requirements are not high, so you can run the program on any modern day computer.

BlazeDVD provides a familiar user interface, which makes it possible to master its controls in a few minutes. You can extend the interface to reveal a series of options for changing the brightness, contrast, hue and saturation levels, zooming in on the video playback, changing the aspect ratio and more. Another option, on the player's main interface, will bring up a media library, on a compact window. Besides organizing and saving a playlist, you may also manage bookmarks, captured images and recordings.

If you insert a movie DVD, its chapters will appear in the playlist automatically. If you want to prevent children from playing inappropriate movies, you will be pleased to know that BlazeDVD comes with a built in parental control feature. The software's tabbed settings window is where you can restrict movies by their ratings (PG-13, R, NC-17 and so on).

Besides movies on DVDs, BlazeDVD can also play common video files on your hard drive, audio CDs. Additionally, it can use image files to play a slideshow. You can find many other functions, which are both useful and easy to understand. The general settings panel is well organized, so you will not spend your time staring at the screen.