CyberLink Media Suite 9

Manage all of your media – pictures, music, videos, etc. – with this powerful, must have Windows app.

If you're like me, then you have digital media coming out of your ears – photos, music, video – and more coming nearly every day. It's not always easy to manage when items are coming at you from all directions. That's one of the reasons why I like CyberLink Media Suite. It’s a media management tool for Windows.

CyberLink Media Suite is a 10-in-1 software suite featuring PowerDVD for movie playback, PowerDirector for video editing, PowerProducer for DVD authoring, Power2Go DVD burner and 7 other, additional CyberLink apps, including CyberLink WaveEditor for editing your digital audio. It's an all-in-one DVD & Blu-ray Media suite that allows users to view and work with HD content, including Blu-ray.

One of the biggest things in HD TV as of late is 3D. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of 3D content out there to be had. With PowerDVD, you can use TrueTheater 3D to transform 2D Blu-ray videos into 3D movies in real time. PowerDVD also works wonders for SD DVD's, too. TrueTheater HD up-converts your DVD's and vides to near-HD quality. Your SD movie collection is now free of pixilation and other distracting artifacts.

If you have an HD video camera, PowerDVD is the ultimate media player for viewing your HD videos right on your PC. You can watch AVCHD home videos captured on your camcorder or MKV and FLV files. PowerDVD also supports two new 3D formats – MVC Transport Stream 3D (M2TS) and MK3D – in addition to MVC 1080i 3D PowerDVD also supports quality of 5.1 channels Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD soundtracks for truly HD quality entertainment

When it comes to your digital photo collection, CyberLink Media Suite has you covered there too. You can use MediaShow to organize all of your photos and home videos. You can sort items by date, album or people. MediaShow automatically organizes your photos and videos into a calendar view by the date they were shot.

Once in MediaShow, you can use its FaceMe technology to identify and tag people in your collection. The app is surprisingly accurate. Once faces are tagged, MediaShow makes it easy to locate every photo that a person appears in.

App Pro’s: 3D and SD Blu-ray and DVD up scaling, HD audio,

App Con’s: Pricey.

Conclusion: CyberLink Media Suite is a really nice application suite. It offers a great deal of value and integrates all of its media offerings in a way that allows you to get the most value. There isn't much that the suite can't offer you, or can't do. The only downside to all of it is its price. At over $100USD for the Ultra package, it’s a bit on the expensive side. However, if you make good use of MediaShow to organize and share your photos and PowerDVD to upscale both Blu-ray and DVD video, you're more than going to get your money's worth. You just need to make sure you use what it offers, often.