For the BDR-2203's software bundle, Pioneer has turned to CyberLink. The CD that comes with the drive contains a slimmed down version of the CyberLink Blu-ray Disc Suite which includes PowerProducer, Power2Go and PowerDVD.
CyberLink PowerDirector 7 - The BDR-2203 comes with CyberLink's video editing software, PowerDirector. To create your own custom movies, simply drag and drop video footage onto the editing timeline and then add scene transitions, background music, or title effects.
You can also use PowerDirector's "Magic" editing tools to clean up video clips and images, condense long video segments and apply pre-designed style templates. When you're done editing your video, you have the option to save it to your hard drive, create a streaming file or write it back to DV tape.
CyberLink Power2Go 6 - Power2Go is the main disc burning program included with the BDR-2203. With this software, users can create various types of CD's, DVD's and BD's or make backups of existing discs. Power2Go also offers enhanced security features, allowing you to password protect and encrypt the names of files on your discs.
CyberLink PowerDVD 8 - CyberLink's PowerDVD is one of the more popular software DVD players on the market right now. Along with support for DVD's, it can be used to play back Blu-ray Discs and other high-def formats including H.264, HD MPEG-2, and WMV-HD. With its support for BD-Live, PowerDVD also gives you the ability to access additional content via the Internet.
The version of PowerDVD bundled with the BDR-2203 also supports 6 speaker (5.1) output. While this isn't enough to take full advantage of uncompressed audio formats like Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, its a big step up from the 2 channel version that most manufacturers include with their drives.
Like Pioneer's previous Blu-ray Disc writers, the BDR-2203 isn't short on features. This Serial ATA equipped drive offers some of the fastest Blu-ray reading and writing speeds available and is backwards compatible with all major CD and DVD formats, including DVD-RAM. The BDR-2203 also sports a 4MB buffer and includes a software bundle from CyberLink, but lacks bitsetting support for single layer DVD+R and DVD+RW media. Even then, the Pioneer BDR-2203 scores a solid 8 out of 10 for its features.
