PowerDVD

Gods, I hate PowerDVD. It's best summarized as "Hot garbage that someone was paid to make", and it is quite literally one of the worst media playback programs I've ever had to use. I think I'd have to deliberately hunt for a broken media player to find worse.

But if I want to play Blu-Ray DVDs, it's one of the only options I've got, as it's sadly one of the few programs capable of doing so, due to security encryption and such, and it's either use Powershite, or swap disks in my PS4 all the time.

But I digress.


The problem is that once installed in Windows 10, no matter what defaults I set or how I set up auto-play, double-clicking the icon for a DVD just opens it in PowerDVD.

The solution was in a forum thread; the subject of editing registry keys to remove references to PowerDVD was mentioned.

A Cyberlink rep in the thread said to remove:


HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Classes\\SystemFileAssociations\\Audio\\Shell\\PowerDVD13CommandVerb
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Classes\\SystemFileAssociations\\Video\\Shell\\PowerDVD13CommandVerb
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Classes\\SystemFileAssociations\\Image\\Shell\\PowerDVD13CommandVerb

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\Audio\\Shell\\PowerDVD13CommandVerb
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\Image\\Shell\\PowerDVD13CommandVerb
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\Video\\Shell\\PowerDVD13CommandVerb


These keys were not present for me, and a further response indicated if I wanted to go down this route, I'd have to manually remove a reference from every bloody domain extension. Not happening.

A user, "Det." apparently signed up just to drop the magic bullet they used, and thank god for that. They said they used ShellMenuView by NirSoft, which proved an excellent solution. Using that, I was able to disable all context menu entries for PowerDVD, which would stop it being used by Windows to open anything in the disk drive.

Actually opening a blu-ray in PowerDVD is now a little more difficult, it involves dragging the disk drive icon onto PowerDVD, but it pisses me off about 80% less.

And so my wrath at being mildly inconvenienced is assuaged.

Now, if PowerDVD stopped being garbage and actually played media competently (rather than causing visual glitches across both monitors, having no options, being slow to load both DVDs and Blu-Ray, and having UI response times anywhere between 3 seconds and never) I wouldn't have had this problem.

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