It's been years since the last time I used an HP laptop. I was shocked at how much they overlayed on the operating system when I started really using my new HP laptop. In addition to system overlays, HP includes a fair bit of its own software on the laptop including HP MediaSmart DVD.

As its name implies, HP MediaSmart DVD is a dvd player. In point of fact, it's a blu-ray player which is nice. I don't yet have any blu-ray discs as this is my first player, but I'm sure I'll appreciate the support at some point in the future. This review, however, focuses on my current usage model which is playing standard DVD discs.

The first time I inserted a DVD into this laptop, I got a familiar popup window asking if I'd like to use Windows Media Player or HP MediaSmart DVD. I'd been using Windows Media Player as my DVD player on my old laptop and was surprisingly happy with it so I selected it. However, the next time I inserted a disc, I wasn't given a choice. HP MediaSmart DVD launched automatically.

Always willing to give a new application a try, I didn't try to do anything about this. I soon found myself very unhappy with the player, though, and determined to use Windows Media Player instead (at least until I acquired some blu-ray discs). I set Windows Media Player as my default DVD player. The next time I inserted a DVD disc, it automatically opened in HP MediaSmart DVD player. I set the default again and again it was ignored. As far as I can tell, there is no way to prevent something like 98% of DVDs from automatically opening in the HP application. That's incredibly irritating.

I should back up and explain why I don't like HP MediaSmart DVD. To do so, I need to explain a bit about my viewing habits. In a nutshell, I often watch DVDs in the background while I do other things on my computer. This is particularly true for concert DVDs or movies I've seen repeatedly; I do usually give a disc my undivided attention the first time I watch it, but only periodically do so after that point. Thus, most of the time I'm using the DVD player as a window occupying a portion of my screen real estate. Unfortunately, the HP MediaSmart DVD functionality is seriously curtailed in this state.

As far as I can tell, the only controls available from within a player in this state are on a small toolbar that pops up along the bottom edge of the window when you mouseover it. This toolbar includes the name of the DVD to the left as a non-clickable label, a previous chapter|play/pause|next chapter trio of buttons in the center, and a ridiculously large volume control on the right side. That's it. Believe it or not (and I still don't despite the evidence I see every time I play a DVD), there's no menu button anywhere. That's inexcusable.

In order to access the menu button, you must be in fullscreen mode. If you expand the player to fill the screen, additional buttons appear on the menu along the bottom of the screen (although, interestingly, the name of the DVD is no longer shown). Some system information and controls also appear along the top edge of the screen. Both of these menus appear by default but can be popped in and out of view by clicking anywhere on the screen.

The fullscreen toolbar adds four additional buttons to the left of the directional controls. It also adds a status bar above the buttons with chapter markers and an indicator marking your current place on the disc. By dragging the current place indicator, you can move to any other place on the disc. Sometimes the player will just continue playing from the new spot and other times it will automatically pause requiring manual intervention to begin playing again. I have found no rhyme or reason to its choice between these two behaviors. Other software offering this type of status bar generally automatically continue playing after the location is changed and it nearly always causes me a moment of confusion when this player doesn't.

The first new button underneath the status bar opens up an options menu with a limited group of audio and video preference settings controlling things like whether subtitles appear and the speaker output choice. This menu also lists available software updates and lets you download them for installation. I'm not sure how often updates are released and if the actual installation process can be launched from here as no updates have been available since I started using this player.

The next two buttons are fairly standard - eject and menu. The menu button pops up another window listing each available menu, permitting you to select one. For most discs, the two options are root and title. The title menu goes to the main menu while the root menu typically goes to some other random point in the disc menuing system (in the case of the disc I'm watching now, it goes to the subtitle selection screen) which is always the same each time. The same disc in Windows Media Player assigns the title menu to the main menu and the root menu to the point in the menuing system where you started playing the disc. For example, if you used the chapter selection menu to start at chapter 3, the root menu would return you to the chapter selection menu. If you just started playing from the main menu, it would return you there instead. This was particularly nice if watching a concert; it made it easy to skip around from song to song without a lot of extraneous clicks.

The last new button is a bookmark button. A nice feature in theory, I find it incredibly unintuitive and difficult to use. Clicking on the button pops up a window asking you to name the bookmark. Once you do, a little dot appears just under the status bar at that location accompanied by a small label in tiny print. I find these labels unreadable and wind up moving the current location indicator to each dot to find out what they are. There's also no way to remove bookmarks as far as I can tell which is irritating. Between these two annoyances I find that I don't use bookmarks.

The information at the top of the screen is just odd. The middle area - prime real estate - is permanently set to display "HP MediaSmart DVD" and the right area is a larger version of the standard minimize/toggle screen mode/close buttons. The left side has a large wave button that pops up a translucent toolbar allowing you to open a variety of other HP-specific media applications designed to play music, display digital photographs, play television online, upload media files, and other similar tasks. The first option is the DVD player you're already using which makes no sense at all. Also interesting is that some of the options in this menu do not seem to be available in the media dropdown in the amazingly irritating desktop toolbar HP inflicts on its users.

Immediately to the right of this wave button are representations of the wireless connection status and the battery status of the laptop. Using the same icons as the system tray display on the bottom of the regular laptop display, on the surface this is a fairly nice if somewhat ^^outofplace,random feature. Unfortunately, it's just window dressing - literally. The displays do not actually reflect the current status of either the internet connection or the battery life. The display always shows 100% and plugged in for battery and full bars for the wireless status even if on battery power or currently unconnected to a network. What's the point of that?

The sound and picture quality using this player are excellent, but no better than with any other audiovisual application. I have a nice screen and particularly exceptional speakers. Still, it is important to note that this player does nothing to impede them in any way. My problems with this player are not with the quality of play, but with its interface.

I still use HP MediaSmart DVD some of the time, but that's mostly because it's a pain to wait for it to start playing, stop it, then open Windows Media Player and wait for it to start playing. If I could get Windows to accept Windows Media Player as the default player or if Windows actually popped up the player selection window that was standard on my old machine (I'm not sure why it only does this 1-2% of the time or if this is a bug in Windows 7 or a symptom of the HP operating system overlays) I wouldn't use it unless or until I started playing blu-ray discs. I don't like the application at all.

Recommended: No