PowerDVD has always been pretty good, though the version Dell ships is pretty outdated. I believe its up to version 6 now compared to the version 4 build Dell distributes. If I have any issues with Power DVD I usually just use Media Player Classic, which is built off the old style Windows Media Player and has its own internal MPEG 2 codec for DVD playback.

I just installed MCE2005 and tried the nVidea encoder . . seems to work a little more effectively than using PowerDVD . . ( which I used on the last install )

wrs