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Version: 5.50.1914 (Deluxe) |
CyberLink Corporation was kind enough to provide us with their next generation DVD, Blu-ray and HD DVD burning solutions: Power2Go 5.5. The new era of next generation discs has dawned and both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats provide you with disc capacities ranging from 15-30GB in the case of HD DVDs to 25-50GB with Blu-ray discs. Power2Go 5.5 now supports both next generation disc formats as well as enhanced data security. Follow us through this review and find out more about the performance of CyberLink Power2Go 5.5.
Corporate Information:
Founded in 1996, CyberLink Corp is a world leader and pioneer in bringing advanced digital video and audio software to the market. Producer of the world's leading DVD software player, PowerDVD, CyberLink also delivers complete solutions for the digital home and online learning solutions.
CyberLink's strength lies in its in-depth knowledge of digital video codecs, owning a number of patented digital video and audio technologies. Combined with extensive user-interface research, CyberLink has successfully launched multimedia applications that are robust and powerful, yet friendly enough for the non-professional users.
With customers spanning from multinational corporations, leading brands in the IT industry such as Dell, HP, Medion, Fujitsu Siemens, NEC PB, Samsung, LG, Sony, ACER, Asus, etc. to small/medium sized businesses and power users to home users, CyberLink has enjoyed rapid growth and consistent profitability leading to a record breaking IPO in October, 2000 on the Taiwan Over The Counter Exchange (OTC: 5203). Currently, CyberLink is listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: 5203.TW)
Technologies and Solutions:
Digital Home Solutions
Cyberlink’s vision of the digital home ecosystem delivers the ultimate media entertainment for the best digital TV, video, music and photo experience. Featuring advance technologies for home connectivity and sharing media across PCs to CE and portable devices, plus digital right management, CyberLink’s digital home solutions deliver state-of-art technologies for tomorrow’s needs.
Next Generation DVD Solutions:
CyberLink DVD Solution includes DVD burning and media creation applications with the latest technologies to capture, edit, author, burn and playback all types of media. As of today, CyberLink’s products are fully prepared for the next generation DVD formats: Blu-ray and HD DVD delivering the best and latest burning and playback applications for our customers.
eHRD Solutions
CyberLink offers complete human resource development tools and solutions for businesses today. CyberLink eHRD solutions include the learning platform, performance appraisal, competency management, individual career development and successor plans. All these are necessary tools to retaining key talents and managing knowledge workers effectively.
Power2Go 5.5 - Secure Next-Gen Burning, The Fun-and-Easy Way
Next Generation Burning with Blu-ray Disc & HD DVD
The new era of next generation discs has dawned and both Blu-ray-Disc and HD DVD formats provide you with disc capacities ranging from 15-30GB in the case of HD DVDs to 25-50GB with Blu-ray Discs. Power2Go 5.5 now supports both next generation disc formats as well as enhanced data security. Welcome to the next generation of disc burning... more on data burning
Complete All-Out Burning
Power2Go, the all-media disc burning software, provides complete support for next generation and traditional disc formats and boasts enhanced security features in addition to other exciting burning features.
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Burning Data |
Burning Music |
Burning Videos/Photos |
Burning Copies |
Fun & Easy Drag-and-Drop Burning...
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Burning with Power2Go’s Express icons is not only fast and furious, but convenient and maybe too darn fun. Simply drag-and-drop files from your desktop to the Express icons and with a click of a button, burning begins. Cool dynamic icons and skins offer you variety and a burning addiction not easily remedied. You receive 5 default skins in Power2Go. When you register online, you'll get 7 more including the Puff Men series displayed here, so don't delay in making them a part of your burning family. |
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Burning Technologies
As burning discs becomes more widespread, burning technology will continue to push the envelope. Journey with Power2Go 5 and embark on new burning frontiers and utilize burning technologies with broad support and all the tools you need.
- Secured data discs for enhanced security with password protection and AES 128Bit encryption NEW
- Maximum burning speed intelligently optimizes burning by matching your disc capabilities to your burner's maximum speed
- Extra-Long Disc Support burns up to 99 minutes (870 MB) on a single CD-R disc
- UDF 2.5 support for next-generation burning like Blu-ray Discs and current media such as CDs or DVDs
- 16x burning completes a 4.7 GB disc in approximately 6 minutes
- Double Layer technology allows you to burn up to 8.5 GB of data, music, or video files onto double-layer discs
Everything you need...
You have handy utilities at your fingertips to erase and copy discs, save and burn disc images, and rip and convert audio files.
What’s inside the package?
Although the software provided to us for this review is a 50.4MB downloaded version, CyberLink also offers retail box version that looks like below:
Test machine:
For this review we will be using computers with the following configurations:
Hardware #1:
Motherboard: Hewlett Packard 3085
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Memory: 1280 MB MDT512M PC333 CL2
Video: ATI Radeon XPress 200M
Sound: Conexant AMC Audio
Hard disks: Seagate Momentus 100GB ST9100822A
Optical Drive: TSST CD/DVD-RW TS-L532R
Hardware #2:
Motherboard: ASRock K7S8X
Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2200+
Memory: 512 MB DDR 400; Infineon
Video: Gainward GeForce 440MX; 128mb RAM
Sound: RealTek AC97 Integrated Digital Audio
Hard disks: Samsung SV0802N 80GB; Western Digital WD 30 00JB 300GB and 30GB Seagate ST 330621A (USB 2.0)
Optical Drives: Lite-On SHM-165P6S; NEC 3540A; BTC 1108 IM
Hardware #3:
Motherboard: ASUS P5W DH Deluxe WI-FI/AP
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 Conroe 2.13GHz @3.40 GHz
Memory: 2GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 PC2-6400
Video: ATI RADEON X850XT Platinum Edition
Sound: Realtek ALC882 High Definition (onboard)
Hard disks: 160GB Seagate SATA-II, 300GB Seagate SATA-II, 300GB Maxtor SATA.
Optical Drive: Panasonic SW-5582 Blu-ray drive
System set-up #1:
System set-up #2:
System set-up #3:
For the Blu-ray support we will use Panasonic SW-5582 Blu-ray burner with firmware BXD2.
System requirements:
Operating System
- Windows XP, 2000, ME, 98SE (Windows XP and 2000 recommended)
Screen Resolution
- 800 x 600 pixels
Memory
- 128 MB SDRAM (256 MB DDR RAM recommended)
CPU
- VCD production: Intel Pentium II 450
- DVD production: Intel Pentium III 800 MHz, or AMD Athlon 700 MHz
(Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz, AMD Athlon 2100+ or above recommended)
Hard Drive Disc Space
- 1 GB for making VCDs
- 5-10 GB for making DVDs
- 15 GB for making HD DVDs
- 25-30 GB for making BDs
Software Installation:
Once the download was finished the installation process was started quickly by double-clicking the setup file. The installation itself was straightforward and completed with out any problems. After entering the CD Key the following applications where installed.
- Power2Go
- Power2Go Express
- System Diagnostics
Program Run Through
Once installed, Power2Go 5.5 offers us two main ways to burn our data to disc. The first and in this review not further explained is the so called “Power2Go – Express mode”.
The program can be found on the left of our desktop and it should enable us to create a data, music or video disc as well as copy a disc in only two steps. Here is not more to do than to add the content to the appropriate icon via drag and drop.
Once added we only need to start the burning process by clicking onto the record button in the icon. In case we want to do a further modification of our content, we only need to double click on the icon itself and an additional window will open.
Above we see the window for the modification of a video disc.
Alternatively, this program offers us possibility to do some very basic settings which are accessible by right-clicking the icons. These are:
- Add/Remove content
- Burn now
- Erase disc
- Clear all
- Burner selection
- Help
Some more general settings are available via the Power2Go Express icon in the system tray
Of course we can also change the style of the icons and they can be placed on the desktop where we like.
But now let’s have a look how the more powerful Power2Go mode looks like.
The first screen when we come around when the program is opened, the so called “Select a Burning task” window.
As you can see above, the window is very simple structured and gives a very good overview of all the possible tasks the software is capable of. The program gives us also a short explanation of what the selected task is able to do.
After clicking onto the OK button, the regular Power2Go window opens.
Once more we find a very easy to understand and simple structured window with some menu buttons on the top.
Now let’s continue with testing the burning capabilities of the software….
Burning Data Disc: Blu-ray
The Data Disc option allows you to burn data files to CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD-RAM, Blu-ray, or HD DVD disc. Data files can include documents, images and any other files. You can also create a bootable CD, DVD, Blu-ray, or HD DVD disc, which you can use to boot your computer from the disc.
For this section we selected Disc Type of Blu-ray Disc and choose a random data files to burn to our BD-RE media.
We select random files of around 23GiB of data files.
The information window containing the drive capabilities, type of media in the drive and project statistics.
In the Data window we selected UDF2.5 file system.
In the Burner windows we selected the maximum speed supported 2x and click “Burn”.
The software successfully burned our 22.4GB of data to BD-RE media in 1h:39m:20s, indicating verification was enabled.
Burning Data Disc: CD/DVD
Now let us look how the software performs when burning CD and DVDs. Since the steps are always the same, we have decided to show here only the images from the creation of a data DVD.
The steps required to burn a Data DVD are almost the same like we have seen before for the creation of a Blu-ray disc. First we need to select the Disc Type.
Next we need to select the files we want to burn onto disc. Once selected we can easily add them via drag and drop.
After clicking the burn button and before the real burning process starts another window will pop up. On the information tab we can check all the important information for our project.
On the second tab we can define if we want to make our disc bootable, an auto-run disc or of we want to change the disc icon. Also, we can define the used file system and it’s also possible to automatically split the content.
In the common Window we can set the disc name and play around with some date functions.
In the Burner windows we selected the maximum speed supported 8x and click “Burn”.
In this case the whole process finished after approximately 12 minutes.
Now let’s move to the next page and check the software’s security functions…..
Burning Secured Data Disc: Blu-ray
The Secured Data Disc option allows you to burn password-protected data files to a CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD-RAM, Blu-ray, or HD DVD disc. You can also burn secured data disc with file name encryption. Users will not be able to see the encrypted file names without the password. Data files can include images and any other document files. Note that you cannot burn a secured data disc in Power2Go Express Mode. Also bootable data discs are not available for secured data burning.
For this section we selected Disc Type of Blu-ray Disc, enter password and select the option to hide the file names in a secured disc.
We select random files of around 23GiB of data files to fit in our BD-RE media.
The information window containing the drive capabilities, type of media in the drive and project statistics.
In the Data window we selected UDF2.5 file system.
In the Burner window we selected the maximum speed supported 2x and click “Burn”.
The software successfully burned our 22.4GB of data to BD-RE media in 44m:30s.
Disc burned with Power2Go's secured data burning technology comes with a CyberLink Security Browser so that users can view the content of the disc.
When you insert a secured data disc into the disc drive, the Security Browser will be automatically launched and prompts you for the password. After you entered your password, the Security Browser windows will be displayed and you can select the files you want to extract.
Burning Secured Data Disc: CD/DVD
Again, the procedure is the same like we’ve already seen it for Blu-ray discs.
We need to select disc type and to enter a password.
We select around 4.4GB of random files (in this case mainly photos) and click the burn button.
Again, the information window opens, but this time we don’t navigate through all the options and simply click the burn button again.
The burning process finished after approximately 12 minutes.
If we now reinsert the disc, the security browser opens. We need to enter the password and then we are able to view the disc content.
Music Disc:
The music dsic option allows us to create CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+/-R or DVD+/-RWs with audio content on it. Besides the most common Audio CD, Power2Go 5.5 is also capable of creating MP3 or WMA discs. Here for example we’ll create a regular Audio CD, playable in almost each modern CD-player.
In the select a burning task wizard we select CD for Disc Type, Audio CD for Content Type and click OK to open the regular program interface..
Here we only need to add our audio files to the project via drag and drop. After all wanted files have been added, the software offers some basic functions to modify the content.
We can enter the edit CD text menu via right-clicking the track we want to change. A second, sometimes very useful feature is the adjust audio button. We can find it in the middle of the interface and like its name already tells us, it enables us to set the volume for a given track. But now back to changing the CD text.
As you can see above, we are able to edit Title and Artist and we can also add some additional information if we like.
After clicking the Burn button, the already known Configuration/Information window opens. Besides some information regarding Disc, Drive and current project, we can here now also find one tab to make some settings for our Audio CD.
On this tab we can choose if we like to have CD-Text enabled and if yes we can also add some for disc information. Here it’s also possible to normalize the volume in all tracks of the CD and in case that our selected content is larger than the capacity of the disc, we can also force the program to Auto-split the content by disc capacity. And last but not least we can insert a gap between the tracks.
On the last tab in this window, we can make some burner specific settings, such as burn speed and enabling buffer underrun protection.
When all necessary settings are we only need to hit the burn button again.
As you can see above, the burning process has finished after 2 minutes and 38 seconds.
This procedure is almost the same for other disc and content types too, is it MP3 CD/DVD or WMA CD/DVD.
Let us now look into the video/photo functionality of Power2Go 5.5…..
Video/Photo Disc:
The Video/Photo disc option allows us to create our own DVD or VCD from any with a Camcorder recorded video file. This program part “only” supports CD and DVD formats and there is no support for the upcoming blue laser formats Blu-ray and HD-DVD, at least at the moment of this writing.
This section of the program targets CD/DVD burning newbie’s and the average home user who wants to create nice looking video content very fast and without much editing.
As we can see in the image above, the program offers three possible ways to create a video disc. While Video CD and DVD-Video are also offering editing functions is Burn from a existing DVD-folder only helpful when we have already “burned” a video onto our hard disc (in DVD-Video format). This feature also enables us to burn a Video-DVD from movies in DVD format which have been previously saved on the hard disc (also with other programs).
The program interface is very simple designed and it’s easy to find all features. Clicking onto the small button with the red plus symbol on it opens the window to select the video files we want to add.
The preview sections of the import window can be very helpful if we are not sure what content the selected file contains.
After we have finished to add our video files we can begin to use the editing functions.
Like already mentioned before, the program is very limited when it comes to video editing. The only available features are
- Trimming
- Create thumbnail from current frameAdjust video volume
If we now like to add some photos to our DVD we only need to click the small button under the CyberLink image in the photo section of the program.
Once the button is clicked an other window opens. Here we can add the slideshow content as well as some background music and we can also set the slide duration.
The “import” window has the same design like the “add video window”
We find once more a very limited functionality to edit our photo content. It is only possible to sort, move and rotate the images.
Also, the program only allows to add one slideshow (at least, we didn’t find the option to add an additional one)
After we have edited our video and photo content we can continue with modifying the menu. Powe2Go comes with only one menu theme, others can be purchased on the CyberLink website by clicking the “More” button.
The other functions to modify the menu are
- Background Image – Here we can choose any image/photo we like and the program will resize the image to TV screen size automatically.
- Background Music – allows us to use any audio file we like.
- Menu Caption Text – here we can enter and format the text, shown in the DVD menu.
After all settings are done and we hit the burn button the usual “Configuration/information” window opens.
Under “Video” we can make some more disc specific settings such as TV-Format, enabling the creation of a DVD-folder on the hard disc, audio format and a few other settings.
On “Common” we can enter the disc name.
On “Burner” we can make the usual, burner specific settings.
For this 30 min Video, the program required a little bit more than 1 hour to finish the whole process.
Now lets continue with copying discs…..
Copy Disc: Blu-ray
The Copy Disc option allows you to make an exact copy of a disc of any format. However, you must copy the disc contents onto a blank disc of the same disc type. (You cannot, for example, copy content from a CD onto a DVD.) Some discs may not be copied if they are copy-protected or contain errors.
In the Burning Task we choose Copy Disc.
For the source and target we choose the same Panasonic SW-5582 Blu-ray drive with maximum read and write speed. Then we click “Copy”.
The reading process took 45m:35s for around 23GiB of data.
At this point the disc is ejected and there is a notification window to insert a disc to the target drive.
The writing process took about 1h:35m at 2x and overall project with the reading process finished in 2h:25m:17s.
Copy Disc: CD/DVD
Copying a disc is once more a very simple procedure and the required steps are the same as for a Blu-ray Disc.
First we need to select “Copy Disc” in the “Select a Burning Task” window.
Selecting source and destination drive. In case we like to copy the disc content to our hard disc, then it is possible by activating the checkbox in this window.
The last step to perform this task is to click the Copy button.
Disc Utilities
Powe2Go offers some nice utilities which can be helpful when it comes to extracting and/or converting audio files from CD/DVD or movie files. This part of the program also offers some tools to create and burn disc images and also to erase DVD+/-RW disc.
Let us now look into this utility collection and start with the “Create Disc Image” tool.
Save Disc Image
Like its name already tells us, this tool allows us to save a image of a entire disc on our local hard drives.
This is a very simple task, we only need to select the “Save Disc Image” option in the “Select a Burning Task” window and click OK.
Another window opens and we need to select the source drive and the location where the image should be saved.
Once the process has started the usual window, with the progress task bar and some other information, opens and a “Completed successfully” message pops up when the task has finished.
Burn Disc Image
This task is as simple as the creation of a disc image.
Selecting the task.
A similar window to the previous seen “Save Disc Image” window opens. Here we need to select the source file from our hard disc and the burner.
Erase Disc
The program also provides us with a tool to easily erase our DVD+/-RW disc. Once more the usage of the tool is very simple.
We just need to select “Erase Disc” in the already well known “Select a Burning Task” window.
After selecting the burner and the type of erasing we hit the Erase button and the process starts.
Quick erase for a 4x disc took approximately one minute and the Full erase was done in about 17 minutes.
Rip Audio
Now let’s have a look into some more interesting and in other programs not as easy designed features. Let’s rip a Audio CD onto our hard disc.
We need to select “Disc Utilities” and then “Rip Audio”
Now we can select the source drive and the tool offers us several ways to receive/enter the information for the disc. The first and most comfortable way is to grab the information from a database out of the internet. For this task we click the “Get Disc Info from freedb” button and once done, the following window opens.
Here the tool makes a suggestion for disc information and if we are satisfied with the given suggestion then we can agree by clicking OK.
The information has now changed and we can continue with some other settings, such as read speed, destination folder, selecting the songs we want to rip and the settings for format and quality of the resulting audio files.
Now the ripping process should start after the “Go” button is clicked.
But in our case the message above popped up. Here the program appears to have a problem with naming the titles when it graps the disc information out of the internet.
There is no way around and we have to manually edit the information for each title we want to rip.
The exact problem in this case is the slash which has been inserted to make a difference between artist and track title. So we have to cut and paste the artist into the Artist field manually. Here it would be much easier to use the “Split Tag..” option out of the menu, but sadly, the program didn’t perform this task.
However, we have managed it to edit all tracks and can now start to rip them to our hard disc.
Ripping is now done.
Convert Audio
Besides the above shown ripping of audio content to our hard disc is this program also able to convert already ripped audio files into the MP3, WAV or WMV format.
We select and open the “Audio Converter” tool and the following window pops up.
Here we can select the source files, the destination folder and the format and quality of the resulting files.
Once the files are imported and all the other settings are done, we can continue with converting the files.
The whole process runs very fast and once done, a “Conversation successful” message pops up.
Let us now continue with positives, negatives and conclusion……
Like you have noticed also in other reviews there is no software out yet, from which we can say that it is perfect and on which we have no negative points to add. Let us now list up the main positives and negatives we have found.
Positive:
- Stable and very easy to use
- Good and straight design
- Supports all disc formats
- Can create secured data discs
- Offers almost all required functions
- Some good and very useful tools included
- Good and easy to understand manual
Negative:
- Limited video and photo editing functionality
- Does not support Blu-ray video creation
Conclusion:
Overall we can say that CyberLink’s Power2Go 5.5 is a very well designed and good working program. Especially for people who are new to 
CD/DVD and Blu-ray burning this is a program worth a try. Experts and more pretentious users will miss a few features like more advanced video and photo or options to edit audio content. Also the missing option to create high definition video discs, such as Blu-ray, is a missing feature which makes an overall good program looking much worse than it is.
But now enough with the negative things we have found and let’s have a look onto the good. Besides the good design and the ease of use we liked the option to create secured discs most, it is a feature which is not seen much in other software applications and for sure of interest for many users who want to protect their sensitive private data from unauthorised access by other people. Also the included audio tools (rip and convert) are highly welcome even when they have some little bugs and some may miss support for more file types.
To sum it up, this is what we would say: “CyberLink Power2Go 5.5 Deluxe is a well designed, good working and stable program with some very nice features. Its ease of use makes it recommendable for people who are relative new to computers and who don’t want to spend too much time for backing up data or with creating photo and video discs. More pretentious user will probably prefer other programs.”
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