XBMC Media Center has an interesting history, as it originates from the Microsoft Xbox game console - thus the name XBMC (Xbox Media Center). It has a long history as the project goes back to as far as the year 2002. XBMC can be considered as one of the killer applications for the original Xbox [...]

Pioneer BDC-202 is an interesting combo drive that brings you the features of a Blu-ray BD-ROM drive and a DVD recorder. As such it is an interesting choice for any home computer, but especially for HTPCs due to the Blu-ray playback features. We have just started testing the drive, and as usual our primary interest [...]

Maxell is a well known media manufacturer that has been in the business for decades. They used to ship media of their own using Maxell’s media indetifiers (MID), but recently the manufacturer of their media has varied a lot. We tested their current 16x DVD recordable offering for both, DVD-R and DVD+R. The DVD-R discs [...]

Not too many authors in the blogosphere seem to be interesting in DVD recording and blank media quality. While the recorder and media technology has evolved and matured over the years, the quality of available media on the market still varies a lot. In fact it can vary from absolute rubbish to high quality and [...]

Media Player Classic (usually abbreviated as MPC)  is a light wight, but fully featured audio and video player. It’s user interface is very similar to the old Windows Media Player, thus the name Classic. It has built in codecs and support for VideoCD, Super VideoCD and DVD playback. It utilizes the DirectShow architecture, so it [...]

VLC media player (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG, DivX, Ogg, and many more) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. However in recent years it has also become a extremely powerful server to stream live and on demand video in several formats [...]

Graphically and structurally enhanced, the user interface of this standard benchmarking tool for CD, DVD and Blu-ray drives allows all key functions, such as Benchmark, DiscInfo, DiscQuality and ScanDisc, to be directly accessed and managed through tabs in the main window.
Thanks to specific error messages, test results permit greater differentiation. For example, ScanDisc now also [...]