Today a DVD drive became usual hardware component of a PC, and many PC users got an opportunity to watch DVD movies on their PCs. Unfortunately, developers from Microsoft Co. did not notice this tendency until recently, that's why users of older versions of MS Windows Media Player could not watch DVD movies, because DVD codec was not included. Thus third party software for DVD became very popular, because it contains not only a DVD codec, but also a number of specific settings necessary for watching DVD movies. The good example of advanced DVD player is Hero DVD Player.

The first thing users notice in any software product is its appearance and where controls are located. Well, the interface of Hero DVD Player is a little bit unusual and has some controls which I have not met in other DVD players, but it is rather convenient. Beside typical controls there is a Single Color button to switch to black-and-white video, a Save Picture Sequence button, a scrollbar for smooth changing of play rate and some others. With that you would not find a Pause button, since its functions are performed by a Stop button.

As a manual to the program there is only a small flash presentation, where only key features of the Hero DVD Player are mentioned. Unfortunately, there is no any Help for the program.

A convenient feature that is turned on by default, but could be turned off, is that when you click a Minimize to taskbar button, playing switches to background mode, where a movie is being played in semi-transparent form on a Desktop.

The player pleases also with a number of cool skins. There are both standard skins (Blue Sky and Hero DVD Player) and more interesting ones such as Dragon and Frog available:

All in all, the Hero DVD Player is a real advanced player, because it lets to get a full control over a DVD movie, including functionality to change smoothly play rate, to play separate .vob files and DVD movies from hard disk, to choose an audio stream and many more.

The only important function that I could not find (although it might be in the program) is a menu to choose subtitle language for a movie.

Beside DVD .vob files, Hero DVD Player plays other video files such as MPEG movies. But for playing some types of MPEG movies (with DivX, XviD encoding), additional installation of proper codec is necessary.

There is also one more fact that should be mentioned. After installation beside Hero DVD Player icon one more icon “Hero DVD Player(General)” appears on the Desktop. By clicking this icon another Hero media player is started. This media player plays not only video files, but also other media data such as audio files, windows media files, audio CDs, etc. But it can not play DVDs, and this looks strange to me. I think, it would be much better to have one player instead of these two, but perhaps the second player is only a demo version and needs additional purchase.

To conclude, I would like to mention also the following inconvenient things of the Hero DVD Player. First, the player does not switch off a Screen Saver when playing a movie. Second minor remark concerns misprints in some menus' items. Evidently, developers did not pay much attention to this aspect. I hope, in future they will correct it, because on the whole there are many features implemented in the player that makes it a worthy competitor of other popular DVD players.

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