Ever since the first 'multimedia PCs' with their fancy new CD-ROM drives appeared in the early 1990s, we've been using our computers to enjoy media. As a result, free media players like VLC Player and Windows Media Player that let us listen to music and watch films have become very popular.

Cyberlink's latest version of its PowerDVD software faces the same questions as every previous release: what does it offer over free media software, and does it bring anything new to make it worth upgrading from an earlier version?

In answer to the first question, there are several features that improve media playback. Support for Blu-ray is included (3D and 2D), as is DVD upscaling. This improves the look of SD content on HD TVs, and works well. It also supports DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD lossless 7.1 surround sound, which are essential if you have a decent home cinema setup.

The social side

Cyberlink has recognised that film and music fans are social creatures, keen to share opinions and reviews of their favourite artists and auteurs. PowerDVD integrates some handy social networking features, which let you share your reviews with other users from within the main program.

New releases on DVD, Blu-ray and at the cinema are attractively displayed in the main screen, and clicking them brings up information, reviews and trailers. Rather than opening up a web browser and sending the user to the internet to find information, PowerDVD 11 delivers everything within its own interface, giving a strong impression that this is a program tailor-made for film fans.

Browsing your media through PowerDVD 11 is similar to using Windows Media Player. Folders, external devices and other DLNA computers and drives connected to your network are shown on the left, while thumbnails of the media are displayed in the main window.

Where PowerDVD differs from Media Player is the 'Online media' section. This lets you view media on Facebook and Flickr as if it was stored locally on your PC. This is handy if you want one program to view and play all your media.

Another feature unique to the PowerDVD series is Cyberlink's TrueTheatre technology, which uses the graphics card and processor to improve media playback. With standard definition content, this involves upscaling the resolution so it looks better on HD displays.

While the increase in quality for DVDs is impressive, it really shows in home videos. TrueTheatre smooths out playback and tweaks colours and lighting on the fly. It can also create surround sound effects from stereo sources.

New features

Cyberlink has added various features since version 10, almost all to do with 3D playback. These include support for recorded 3D TV and photos, and 3D upscaling for photos on Facebook and Flickr.

TrueTheatre 3D photo upscaling takes standard two-dimensional photos and transforms them into 3D. It seems to do this by assuming that the foreground details are in focus, then pushing background details back. The results are hit and miss, with some photos (usually of wide landscapes) looking good, but just as many looking awful. The same is true for movie upscaling, although both can be impressive.

The best new feature is the PowerDVD Remote app, included free with the Ultra and Deluxe versions, lets you control playback on your PC using your smartphone. Most of these new features will only really be of interest to people who want to watch 3D content. If you don't and are happy with a previous version of PowerDVD, the upgrade isn't really worth it.

Cyberlink has muddied the waters somewhat by releasing three versions of PowerDVD: Standard (£40), Deluxe (£55) and the version we tested, Ultra (£80). The Standard version doesn't contain a number of the better features included in the other versions, so we wouldn't recommend it.

If you rely on free software to play your media and are keen to share your opinions with other fans, then this is a good product to help get the most out of high and standard definition content.

Roxio's Toast has come a long way from its disc-burning roots. Today, the latest version is Toast 11 Titanium, and it's a versatile multimedia toolkit that lets you burn, capture, copy, convert and share your digital media, quickly and easily.

This expanded brief is reflected in the application's icon, which for the first time has an optical disc in only one toaster slot; the other holds an iPhone 4.

But while Toast has long been a near-essential application for Mac users, the last couple of versions struggled to make a convincing case for upgrading if you already had the previous one. Can Toast 11 Titanium break the mould and appeal to existing users as well as newbies?

Owners of PowerPC-based Macs are spared the choice. Toast 11 is Intel only, an entirely predictable move considering how poorly supported Toast 10 was on PPCs. But if you've an Intel Mac running Leopard or later, the new app brings a wealth of functional and under-the-hood improvements.

It's been rebuilt from the ground up, with a streamlined interface and a faster, more efficient operation.

Media browser

Toast 11's media browser is now part of the main user interface, but you can pop it out as a separate window if you wish.

Project categories are listed at the top of the main screen, with the number of copies and drive selection at its foot instead of on a separate pop-up window. Fewer processes make for a more streamlined experience.

Support for multiple disc burners has been added, and updates are done from within the app. You no longer have to log onto the Roxio website and tediously download the entire suite every time a new version is released.

Toast's video conversion feature now supports a wider range of playback devices than ever before. There are presets to convert footage for Apple TV, Video iPod, iOS devices, most popular games consoles and non-Apple mobile devices such as the BlackBerry or Palm Pre. Alternatively, you can save it out in a specific file format such as H.264, MPEG-4, WMV, MKV and more.

You can make changes to preset profiles and save them as custom settings. The media browser now integrates with Adobe Lightroom as well as iPhoto and Aperture, and outside the browser, you can just drag and drop a file into the main Toast window.

If you have a Mac with CUDA-compatible Nvidia graphics (most recent Nvidia cards support this), a feature called VideoBoost speeds up your H.264 conversions. Toast is still compatible with Elgato's Turbo.264 USB hardware accelerator too. If you have one plugged in, it takes precedence over VideoBoost.

Converting MacFormat's five-minute sample movie to best-quality iPhone 4 video on a 2.0GHz iMac (not CUDA) took Toast 11 six minutes, 36 seconds, but with Turbo.264, it managed it in three minutes, 34 seconds. Rival app Handbrake, encoding using its iPhone 4 preset, took 11 minutes, eight seconds.

Scheduled conversions

Scheduled conversions make their Toast debut. You can now set your video conversions to start at a specific time and date, or after a countdown set in hours and minutes. This is useful if you want to run them during the night, or at other times when you're not using your Mac for other things.

Videos can also be encoded and posted directly to your Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo accounts and tweet video links through Twitter – useful features for those who wish to share their home movies.

You can extract specific video or audio files from an unprotected DVD or VIDEO_TS folder, and even embed subtitles into your conversions. Unfortunately, this proved fickle in execution. Some VIDEO_TS folders converted correctly, others failed to convert at all and one actually crashed the application. We hope future updates will expand compatibility, as it's a great feature when it works.

Toast 11 lets you set video chapter markers manually as well as at preset intervals. With a £15 HD/BD Plug-in, you can create hi-definition discs using a standard DVD, for playback on a Blu-ray player. A new feature also lets you view these discs on your Mac within the application.

It's much easier to create a video/ROM hybrid DVD too. As before, you can add front-end menus to your DVD video discs, but you still can't manually position the buttons.

A new audio-burning feature spans tracks across several discs, with markers indicating where one disc's contents ends and another begins. These markers are placed automatically, but can be manually repositioned, and you can add more if you wish.

Audio CDs have a 99-track limit, however they're created. Unfortunately, this limitation still applies when you're spanning your music over several discs with Toast 11, though we're promised it will rise to 200 tracks with the pending Toast 11.0.1 update.

Help is at hand

If all this seems a little daunting, Toast Assistant brings you several online tutorial videos that explain the app's key features. You can download step-by-step instructions as PDF documents too.

As is usual for a Toast suite, several other applications are included. A redesigned Spin Doctor can now capture audio from a single running application, so if an email or instant message arrives while you're recording, the incoming alert sound isn't captured. Other bundled apps include DiscCatalogMaker, Get Backup 2 and Disc Cover 3.

The £125 Toast 11 Pro also contains Adobe Photoshop Elements 9, Boinx FotoMagico 3 RE, BIAS SoundSoap 2 SE, SmartSound Sonicfire Pro and the HD/BD Plug-in. This turns out to be a real bargain, when you consider Photoshop Elements 9 alone costs almost £80.

Previous Toast updates have been criticised as offering precious little reason to upgrade if you have the previous version. Those criticisms end now.

Toast 11 Titanium's streamlined interface, expanded feature set and online tutorials mean it's definitely worth considering, even if you're an existing user. Only its difficulties converting VIDEO_TS folders stopped it getting that coveted fifth star.

Every time we see a new version of the Cyberlink Media Suite, we're amazed at quite how much they've managed to pack into it – and how many different programs it offers for relatively similar tasks.

In fairness, one mammoth program capable of doing everything would be incredibly unwieldy, but let's be honest, there's little chance you'd actually buy all these applications individually, making the saving less significant than it first seems.

Still, the most notable change from last year's release is in the price of the premium edition of the suite (the three versions have dropped to £50, £70 and £90). This is pretty reasonable considering the difference between the three packages is minor relative to what the average consumer uses.

Despite that, it's worth noting that only the top-end Ultra package (£90) lets you play Blu-ray movies, and only the top two packages let you transcode video (for portable devices or social networks) and support 3D movies. The £50 Centra version is still good if you don't need any of these features.

Multimedia heaven

Taken individually, none of these programs is the best in its field except the highly polished and popular PowerDVD, but they're all solid tools that can handle pretty much everything you throw at them.

Four of them – PowerDVD, MediaShow, PowerProducer and MediaEspresso – handle the majority of the functions that the package performs, while the rest are mainly filler, useful for minor tasks like making DVD labels, but not tools you'll use very often.

PowerDVD is a solid DVD player, with excellent upscaling to HD and good support for 3D (which it can convert to on the fly, in a wide variety of formats) and Blu-ray.

This time around it includes social network integration that lets you review movies you're watching directly on Facebook or Twitter, along with a flash online front-end that updates to show you the latest DVD releases, offers tutorials on using the software. It also has separate tabs for playing movies in a wide range of formats and for handling music (if you need another music player in your life).

MediaShow is another simple application, this time focusing on photos. It integrates with Flickr and Facebook, creates slideshows or gallery discs, helps you print them, and generally keeps all your pictures neat and tidy.

Veni, video, vici

Meanwhile, there's a triumvirate of applications to handle video production. PowerDirector is a good-tempered video editor, with a range of attractive effects and an easy drag-and-drop mechanic. It's still second to Premiere in terms of pure functionality, but it's definitely catching up, as demonstrated by the step up from the previous version's two video timelines to 16.

PowerProducer is a solid little app for capturing content, editing it simply and then burning to DVD - the classic home movie production tool, but not capable of much more.

Finally we come to the suite's newest tool, MediaEspresso. If you want to convert media for portable use or social networks, this should be your first port of call. It's fast and reliable compared to the open source encoders we've tried, it has a wide range of outputs and the movies it produced from our test video transferred easily to iPhone and were generally of good quality.

Beyond these, the package includes label-makers, backup tools, DVD copiers, a sound editor, a fast photo clean-up tool and a variety of even smaller tools that all seem to replicate each other's functions, or at least seem to have overlapping areas of expertise.

Over the years, it's been fun to see how Cyberlink has brought these programs closer together, hiding the rough edges separating them behind increasingly slick interfaces. In this version you can even add programs as favourites in the launcher, though this doesn't reduce the number of clicks needed to get to them.

Sadly, this time round the suite seems to have become riddled with adverts, even at the Ultra level, ranging from ads for new videos in Power DVD to separate windows popping up in PowerProducer encouraging you to upgrade and (at the time of writing) annoying Christmas e-card messages on the interface. It's hardly the worst problem in the world, but is an irritating blemish on an otherwise great suite.

Six grand for a new TV? You're having a laugh. For that we'd want a TV, a car and a holiday in Hollywood, yet that's the asking price of a new 3DTV. And you can bet some people will pay it too, particularly audio-visual enthusiasts.

AV fans, lest we forget, would happily spend hundreds of pounds on an oxygen-free, organic copper, hand crafted single-direction cable and claim it heralded a new age of enlightenment. Us mortals with human senses and inhuman bank managers can only look on and wonder. Those cables are probably poppycock, but could 3D be the real deal – an actual revolution?

If you've not got a king's ransom to spend but want to find out for yourself, don't fret – Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 Ultra 3D could be the answer. It aims to transform your DVDs into an all-out 3D experience.

Before we get to the caveats, let's have some fun. Cyberlink claims it can transform or upscale video in almost any digital format and turn it into just about any type of 3D movie. All you do is insert a DVD, click the interface's '3D' button, select the depth of field you'd like and choose your display system: TrueTheater 3D will do the rest.

The results are, as you'd expect, variable. Take a rough old 2D movie (we tried a Rolling Stones concert) and things go wrong: we found that occasionally a guitar appeared to pop out of the screen. So don't expect your Dad's Army DVD collection to be transformed into an Avatar-style 3D spectacular. But give the system an old 3D movie that demands red-and-blue glasses, wait for it to do its work and then don a pair of Nvidia's 3D glasses, and the results are more convincing.

Finally, when Blu-ray 3D arrives, Cyberlink will offer a free patch and you'll be able to watch the latest generation of digital 3D movies at home. With this grade of source material you'll experience 3D as it's intended to be seen by the movie director.

Now those caveats. First, don't expect PowerDVD 10 Ultra 3D to transform a tired old Pentium 3 into a home entertainment system that will make you spill your popcorn. You'll need a solid dual-core processor and a modern graphics card – an ATI Radeon HD2400 or an Nvidia GeForce 8800GT are the minimum.

For 3D playback you'll also need a 3D display and some 3D glasses. A Samsung SM2233RZ 3D monitor and an Nvidia 3D Vision setup would be perfect, but will probably cost you £350 all-in.

There's one final problem: the headaches. Following a demo of PowerDVD 10 on the best kit available, some of our team experienced terrible eyestrain and headaches. Many people are concerned about 3DTV and headaches (join the debate on our website), so before splashing out on the equipment you need to see 3D, give it a good long try in person. With some aspirin.

Upscale to HD

Moving beyond 3D, PowerDVD 10 still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. Fans of PowerDVD 9's brilliant movie upscaling system will be heartened to know that Cyberlink has improved it further. This feature does a splendid job of converting standard-definition video into something that looks distinctly HD. It's not perfect, but the difference is notable, especially when the two videos are viewed side by side.

Elsewhere, if you have a NAS groaning with movies and music, it's an easy job to point PowerDVD 10 at it and stream the content. Compare PowerDVD 10 with the free and fantastic VLC player and you'll find Cyberlink's program much more refined and frankly easier to configure.

If you're keen to experience 3D, this latest PowerDVD certainly offers a much cheaper route than buying a 3DTV, even when you factor in the hardware requirements.

If you use your PC for DVD playback and you're not using Cyberlink's upscaling system, you're missing out. The most basic £40 version of PowerDVD supports it, and it's worth upgrading your DVD software just to get your hands on that one feature.

Most media suites like to think of themselves as your one-stop shop, but it's rare to see quite so much packed into a single box. Cyberlink's offering comes in three different versions – Centra, Pro and Ultra (ranging from £50 to £120) – with the main difference not being which products you get, but which features are enabled.

The excellent PowerDVD, for instance, is in all of them, along with its TrueTheater system for upscaling and polishing your movies, but you'll need the Ultra edition to watch Blu-ray.

Similarly, while both Pro and Ultra are capable of authoring Blu-ray, the basic £50 Centra version is restricted to DVDs. The number of products available makes picking an edition somewhat confusing as it takes some research to find out exactly what is and isn't enabled for each app on each edition.

Sound and video

The programs make a powerful toolkit. Taken individually, there are superior tools – for instance, we'd take Adobe Premiere Elements over a copy of PowerDirector any day – but together they cover an impressive range.

In no particular order: PowerDVD is the best DVD player available for PC, especially with its aforementioned upscaling options. They're not going to make an old film look like a remastered Blu-ray disc, but they do mitigate the pain of having to drop back to low-res DVD every time you dig a classic film out of your disc pile.

The same technology is offered in PowerDirector 8 as a way of fixing up your own video clips. This is especially handy if you're filming with something like a handheld Flip camera instead of a dedicated HD camcorder, although again, software can only do so much.

Other features include a particle system for adding a bit more life to still images and goofy weather effects to snowy scenes, plus easy control over individual clips and direct publishing onto Facebook and YouTube.

On a smaller scale, PowerProducer is another video based app, this time geared around video capture, burning to discs and making basic menus for DVD and Blu-ray, depending on the version you're using.

On the organisation side, MediaShow handles image and video cataloguing, plus quick fixes and face tagging. Its photographic fixes are the standard ones, from red-eye removal to boosting saturation, but it also handles a number of video-based edits, including removing or reducing camera shake and dialling down the noise and murky colours. Both kinds of fixes are easy to apply to multiple items, making this a good timesaver for batch-editing files.

And the rest…

Those are the headline acts. The rest of the disc is made up with less interesting fare, including a basic sound editor, CD burner, label printer and back-up tool, with the whole suite controlled from a basic launcher application, PowerStarter.

This lets you pick the ones you want to use as favourites and ignore anything that you don't. Its menu is useful if you're learning the ropes, however, focusing primarily on tasks rather than applications so that you don't need to remember what everything in the suite does.

The only thing missing from the set is a decent image editor, although since Cyberlink doesn't make one, its absence isn't much of a surprise.

This is a comprehensive package, especially for the price. All the tools are the full apps that you'd buy individually rather than special editions or cut-down versions, and the low price means that you can easily ignore any that you won't use instead of trying to work out what fraction of the purchase price is going wasted.

All of them make for a decent way to get started, without necessarily acting as a step-up on existing products if you've already bought a couple. As for complete newcomers, while none of the programs share an interface, the main tools are similar enough that jumping between them isn't tricky.

Each features extensive help and access to Cyberlink's online community, complete with plenty of downloads and other assistance.

All of the software included with Nero BackItUp & Burn is designed to be as consumer-friendly as possible. While this results in an interface that can ignore convention in favour of being bubbly, it's still remarkably easy to use due to a reliance on well-explained wizards.

Beyond the basics, there are advanced options that enable you to set up scripts and choose the CPU priority of each task, minimising slowdown when recurring events happen in the background.

Where BackItUp stumbles is in its associated online service, Nero Online Backup. Three months of free access is included with 1GB of available space. But as soon as payment is necessary, the deal becomes considerably less sweet. For 5GB, it costs £10 for a further three months.

BACK UP: Nero BackItUp & Burn's interface is easy enough to get to grips with

More damningly, a 12-month subscription with 25GB of storage costs a hefty £80, compared to just £40 for a year and 100GB on Livedrive. If you're looking for an all-purpose solution, though, this will more than fit the bill.

At one time, Roxio Creator was simply a disc burning tool, but it now offers a wide range of audio and video tools.

The core tasks are still centred around disc creation, but you'll find support for Blu-ray and AVCHD has been brought to the fore. As with previous editions, this is a hefty install and takes close to 3GB of space for the full edition.

Once installed you'll find the new interface is primarily icon-driven, which makes life easier for the first-time user. Roxio has broken each task down into core segments. You'll find Data-Copy, Video- Movie, Music-Audio and Photo sections that perform specific tasks.

However, the main change is the new Home page, which allows you to instantly launch basic tasks, such as disc burning or copying, without having to drill down into subsequent menus.

DVD templates

Just as with Nero, many of the changes are centred on enhancing audio and video. However, here the templates for creating DVD discs are more plentiful and easier to use and Roxio has put a greater emphasis on tutorials for the first-time user.

Rather like Nero's MoveIt software, Roxio's SyncIt! is also a neat tool for converting video and audio for playback on portable devices, such as your iPod or PSP. The tool itself is easy to use and a great way to enhance your daily commute, but in practise it's a rather slow application.

With Roxio Creator 2009 you can't help but feel that most people won't get the full benefit out of the many and varied tools on offer – there are simply too many. However, the core tools now handle better and the result is a more powerful and usable package for all users.

Roxio Toast has been the number one burning tool of choice for the Mac OS for over ten years, with this latest edition being largely an update rather than a major overhaul.

Roxio offer two versions, with Titanium (£80 inc. VAT) being the basic suite, while this, the Pro edition, includes four extra applications that enhance the photo, audio and video editing capabilities.

The layout is straightforward and emphasises the multimedia aspect of the software. Five taskbars run along the top of the screen covering Data, Audio, Video, Copy and Convert. Select one and a sub-menu appears below the tabs allowing you to choose specific tasks.

AVCHD to DVD

Many of the new features centre around HD video. For instance, you can now archive AVCHD video directly from your camcorder to disc, while at the same time create a preview version that is stored on your laptop's hard drive.

Then there are the new video extraction tools, which allow you to copy video clips directly from a DVD. You can do the same with online video for viewing from your hard drive or iPod. Perhaps the most cost-effective new tool is condensing a dual-layer disc to fit on a cheaper single layer DVD, something we found worked very well.

Blu-ray support is now an integral part of the package. Setting up the advanced features wasn't as easy as we would like, as you need to install the Blu-ray plug-in, costing an extra £15 (inc. VAT).

While Roxio Toast remains the best DVD burning suite for Mac users, there is little in this version that will make those already using Toast 9 want to upgrade.

There comes a point in almost every mature software program's life when its developers look at themselves and ask, "What are we going to put it in this now?" Roxio's disc-burning program Toast Titanium passed that point some time ago…

The base Toast software is the CD, DVD and – with the aid of a paid-for plug-in – Blu-ray burning program. Give it video or audio and Toast will burn it to a disc for you, in one of many formats, from data backup through to MP3 CD through to Video CD or DVD.

Like iDVD, it also comes with menu themes, so you don't have to stare at file listings or a blank screen. Toast 10 has 20 new menu styles, which replace those from Toast 9.

Too much of a good thing?

As well as this range of destination formats, there's a wide range of sources you can use: there's an iPhoto and iTunes browser, and tools for compressing videos down so they'll fit onto smaller discs, merging disc images and more.

New to Toast 10 are functions for creating AVCHD archives from your high-def camcorder, so you can archive video for use later; and a tool for creating compilation DVDs from VIDEO_TS folders. But, note that Roxio has removed HD-DVD and DivX disc authoring capabilities.

Unfortunately, to justify Toast 10's rather hefty £80- £120 price tag, Roxio has thrown in just about everything but the kitchen sink.

Features galore

There's a conversion tool that lets you take video and convert it to play on iPods, PlayStations, PSPs, Blackberries, Treos, and other devices. You can extract clips from DVD Video for conversion. There's a new tool for converting audiobook CDs into iPod audiobook format while changing the playback speed. There's even a tool that enables you to capture streaming Flash video from websites such as YouTube.

Bundled with Toast is a plethora of other programs, some of which are obviously relevant, some of which take gilding the lily to a new level: there's DiscCatalog Maker RE for cataloguing disks and creating Cover Flow images for them; CD Spin Doctor for recording and manipulating audio files from LPs, tapes or web streams, cleaning them up and adding metadata; Get Backup 2 for file system folder synchronisation; Disc Cover 2 for making inlays; and the new Streamer application, which together with a free iPhone/ iPod touch application, lets you watch videos you have on your Mac over the net.

Since you have to convert the video anyway, why you wouldn't store it on your iPod, we don't actually know.

Pro options

If you spend the £40 extra on the Professional version of Toast, you'll also get SonicFire Pro for authoring soundtracks; SoundSoap for improving the sound on video and audio files; FotoMagico for creating HD slideshows; and LightZone for touching up photos.

These applications are all available elsewhere for less, but with Toast 10 you will make a saving if you were planning on buying two or more of these.

Still solid

There are some useful new features in Toast 10: the improved interface is easier to read and the media browser is easier to use, although, as a whole, the interface is harder to use, with a lot of the functionality hidden away.

Other features, particularly those in Toast 10 Pro, are largely superfluous. It still offers rock-solid disc burning, and if you want to do some professional authoring Toast is the tool to have, but if you already have an older version then stick with it.

Nero 9 consists of over 20 different tools, from the standard Nero Burning ROM and Nero Express through to Nero WaveEditor and Nero SoundTrax.

While its core skills remain preparing data for copying to disc and archiving, Nero is increasingly beefing up its extras, so you'll even find back-up tools and even online storage being offered with this latest edition.

New software tools

This version of Nero isn't so much an overhaul, more a gentle upgrade of many of the features it introduced in Version 8. For instance, the interface that was drastically changed in Version 8 has seen a cosmetic update, but you won't find anything too drastic.

Tools now launch through a portal called the Nero StartSMart menu, which is a neat touch as it makes finding the right program for the job a lot easier. One such new tool is the TV tuner software, which allows you to change channels, record and then edit files a lot easier than simply importing them.

Video is handled in a slightly more intuitive way than in previous versions. You'll still find support for Blu-ray as well as AVCHD and an increasing emphasis on editing in HD formats. However, your projects can now be saved to disc as usual, or converted and sent straight to your portable media player, or even MySpace and YouTube.

Resource-heavy package

The full set of tools takes up over 1.5GB of hard drive space and, unless you're really going to make the most of all the tools on offer, this suite can seem a little resource-heavy.

Nero 9 isn't a great leap forward in terms of usability, but it's certainly a better proposition over Version 8.

That said, Nero remains one of the more powerful choices out there and certainly matches Roxio blow for blow.