Fengtao was generous, giving away another year's license for their player on GOTD. So, is it worth the $50 asking price, or anywhere close? I recently paid $40 to upgrade PowerDVD Ultra to version 14, & frankly when I just tried a retail Blu-Ray movie disc, it made a huge difference, with the XBMC-based players from DVDFab & Leawo not even in the same ballpark.
Movies are easy. If you took the movie from a Blu-Ray disc & stuck it in a .mp4 or mkv file dozens of players could handle it, but on a retail Blu-Ray disc you've got features & trailers & previews before you get to the menus, with Java running behind the scenes. I happened to have Captain America: The Winter Soldier handy from Netflix, & it was the full retail version.
The 1st thing that happens is you're asked to choose the language... wait a minute... Nero Plat & PowerDVD [& probably several others I haven't tried] have a separate small window with controls to emulate a remote's 4 arrows & enter key -- with the XBMC players, not so. Pressing Enter on the keyboard happened to work -- I know because I went to fix a cup of coffee -- otherwise there's no way I would have waited that long. I didn't have the patience to wait for the 2nd choice, where you're supposed to press the key on the remote to show the pop-up menu, letting you skip the trailers. Assuming I had waited long enough, I'd have faced the same issue of no remote control emulation.
Now to be fair I went into the DVDFab Player's settings & turned off the menus, having it skip right to the movie, & while it did take longer than PowerDVD, it did work on this disc. I have had it fail to work at all with older versions of the player, but I haven't tried it near often enough to say if it's fixed or if it just worked with this one disc. PowerDVD Ultra worked as well as our Sony & Samsung Blu-Ray players -- actually a little better -- with the only delay being the normal loading time to get a disc's Java up & running.
Of course not everyone wants to watch Blu-Ray movies on a PC/laptop, & if you don't, PowerDVD &/or the player in Nero Plat & similar are probably overkill. You *might* get better audio out of apps like PowerDVD, because the tech is the real deal, licensed from DTS & Dolby, rather than something developed through reverse engineering, but most people don't have the audio hardware to be able to tell the difference, If their ears can. OTOH if you want to spend the time & effort, you *might* get a better display tweaking your setup using MPC-HC.
One last difference between the XBMC-based players & PowerDVD that I wanted to mention is that at least on this system, PowerDVD took less CPU to play the Blu-Ray disc. I spotted the high CPU usage checking Task Mgr. to make sure the players were still working -- they had seemed to be stalled. That high CPU usage might make for some drastic delays using lower powered systems.