With new high-definition (HD) movie disc formats upon us, it’s no shock to find manufacturers of DVD player software taking the opportunity to release new versions of their applications.

It is, however, slightly surprising that Intervideo’s WinDVD 8 Gold doesn’t actually support Blu-ray or HD DVD out of the box, despite namechecking both formats on its packaging.
Read the small print and you’ll find that a separate purchase from Intervideo's website is required for this feature.

At the time of writing, we weren’t able to qualify how much this would actually cost (Intervideo’s site simply provides a chirpy 'Available soon - check back often!' message), but we hope it’s not very much, since the £29 asking price of the main application already makes it more expensive than some physical DVD players.

So, apart from being nearly HD-ready, what else is new? Well, there’s support for Windows Vista and Intel Core 2 Duo processors, but a lot of the new stuff seems a little gimmicky. Overlaying video effects like Vintage, Negative or Abstract onto your movies, for example, is not something we would particularly recommend.

Most of the really interesting features have been reserved for the more expensive Platinum edition of the player. Here you’ll find HD file format playback, the capability to run WinDVD as an UPnP server and even a feature that lets you set a movie as your Windows Desktop background. All this and more can be yours for the princely sum of £43.

WinDVD 8 Gold suffers from an annoying installation routine that attempts to clutter your PC with all manner of third-party software (Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, RealPlayer and QuickTime). We have no complaints about audio and video playback quality, however. Both are excellent and there’s plenty of opportunity to tweak picture and sound.

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