For any of you who had the "pleasure" (sarcastic tone) of installing the previous Xing DVD Player v1.0beta, this version looks like a complete rewrite. It is stable and the user interface is actually working and looks good.

The Xing DVD Player derives the used region code from two sources when installed on Windows 98. It requires both the windows 98 region code, and the built-in region setting to be set to the DVD Title you are trying to play. This can be somewhat annoying.

My annoyance with this player is twofold. Firstly, it doesn't support the ATI Hardware Motion Compensation.

Secondly, it's navigation system is annoying. When the FBI copyright warning is showing, you can't skip ahead directly to the movie (as if the average joe even bothers to read this). It seems that certain navigation buttons are just not enabled when you want them to be.

Another small annoyance is the Xing's association implementation code. When you install the Xing DVD Player, it will give you a list of file extensions to associate with the player. However, if you don't select the MPEG extension, each and every time you load the player, it will display a message saying that the MPEG association is no longer assigned to the Xing Player and prompts you if you wish to have Xing as the default MPEG player. Here is where the problem lies, it asks you this each and every time you load the Xing DVD Player, there is no "Do not ask me again" checkbox. Quite annoying.

The Player itself and the engine appear very configurable, with multiple options (shame there is no Brightness option - curse my dark screen).

Note that the Xing DVD DirectShow driver doesn't register itself as the default DVD playing filter if another filter already exists (CineMaster). It will still use it's own driver when playing DVD titles, but other front ends will use the default driver (CineMaster, if installed prior to Xing). So if you want to have the Xing DirectShow driver for use with other DVD Playing front ends, make sure to uninstall previously installed DirectShow drivers.

Other than that, it appears to be a solid player, personally, i would recommend having a P2/350mhz CPU before using it. It seems a bit more power hungry than CineMaster (not by much though).

I wonder what mushroom the person who writes the minimum requirement specifications ate. The minimum P2/233mhz is a joke.