What's Hot:  CinePlayer Surround doesn’t offer very many features to allow the user to adjust the quality of the video however it does give you a decent picture when watching a DVD movie. The program makes use if the capabilities of the
Microsoft Direct X and DirectShow multimedia framework to improve playback quality. The player itself is very sleek. CinePlayer Surround shows you a basic set of controls (Play, Pause, Fast Forward, Rewind and a few others) that you need for playing DVD movies. During playback the controls hide themselves automatically to give you a cleaner look while watching a movie. One feature I really like is that CinePlayer Surround supports the Windows Media Center Remote Control so you can recline back in your chair and use the remote to control different player functions. CinePlayer Surround also supports InterActual-enabled DVDs On the audio side, CinePlayer Surround offers better than average audio quality as well as support for Dolby Headphone. If you're not familiar with this, Dolby Headphone is a signal-processing system that takes up to five channels of audio from any source and transfers it to your headphones and makes it sound like it's coming from that many speakers in an actual room. When you listen to a Dolby Digital or Dolby Surround soundtrack using Dolby Headphone, you actually hear the sound of five speakers: three in front of you, and a surround speaker to each side and, it works with any stereo headphones. CinePlayer Surround also supports Pro Logic from Dolby so you can experience multi-channel surround sound from any stereo source.
What's Not: As a low-end video playback program, CinePlayer Surround offers enough features for the average user who just wants to play DVDs on their PC but for people looking for those extra features they aren't going to find them with CinePlayer.
Once the program was installed I started looking for what could be configured and frankly there isn't much. The program only comes with two choices for settings; Main and DVD.
Under the Main option you can set the Startup Window State (Normal or Windowed), choose to display Animation or Tooltip effects and use the online update manager to check for updates. Under the DVD option you can set CinePlayer Surround as you default DVD player, choose Closed Caption options, Hardware Acceleration and Resume Playback of Previously Viewed Title. Even the audio options are sparse, allowing you to only select the Audio Output, Environment and Enable Low Frequency Effect (LFE). I tried clicking around to see if I might have missed a section but unfortunately that was all CinePlayer offered.
In addition to the lack of configurable features, CinePlayer Surround is currently only designed to support Windows XP or Windows 9x. It did install on Windows Vista however it's video quality suffers and launching the program causes Windows Vista to change your system color scheme to Windows Vista Basic since the program is unable to support Windows Vista Aero. If you’re a Windows Vista user you'll get more features and better quality just using the built-in Media Center for DVD playback.
Another drawback to the program is that it won't allow you to play video files that are on your hard drive. Playing a movie that's in your DVD drive is your only option. It also won't support Divx Pro, DVD-RAM, HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc formats.
Although the program advertises OpenDVD support as a one of it's features, unless you're creating a DVD on a computer with an OpenDVD compliant authoring program the feature is useless. CinePlayer doesn't even offer the capability to capture DVD video.
I was also disappointed that CinePlayer lacks book marking capability, so you can't mark and return to random locations in the video. There's also no context-sensitive menus with the ability to access the root menu, settings or other features. You put your DVD in, click Play and watch the video.
