CyberLink is best known for its PowerDVD movie playback and editing software family, but CyberLink Live is branching out, asking the question: “Why must you be home to view and work with your media?” CyberLink Live is a combination product/monthly service that manages to safely “open up” your PC and its contents, letting you view them with any Internet-connected computer, assuming you provide the right login and password. In other words, you can play your videos, view your photos, monitor your Web cam, listen to your MP3s, download your documents, and watch your TV anywhere in the world you have the Internet, provided your home’s outgoing Internet connection is fast enough.

The service is very attractive and surprisingly full-featured. It instantly transcodes and streams almost any video file, playing it back directly within a Flash-enabled browser, even on Macs and Linux boxes. Your photos appear in an iTunes animated spray or by folder, and CyberLink Live can play slideshows. Your MP3 library is immediately playable, and it can also play as background music during slideshows. Documents basically just download, but you can zip them up before downloading. The Web cam can show live views or just when movement was detected in the recent past, making it easy to locate activity. Assuming you have a TV tuner, all channels stream as if watching them locally, and you can even program timers to record shows for later.

The Flash-based interface is surprisingly spry and has an Apple-esque elegance to it, inviting exploration, but it is dependent on the Internet (along with the entire Cyber-Link Live experience). CyberLink Live works over Port 80 and uses CyberLink’s own proxy servers to get around firewalls, but even on a quick DSL connection (6Mbps down/768kbps up), performance was spotty. Videos look good once rolling, but navigating to different areas of your PC’s library takes time—sometimes too much time to be enjoyable. We recommend taking advantage of the 30-day trial to see if your connection is up to the task.

CyberLink Live does the best it can with today’s Internet, and if that’s good enough for you and you want remote access to your media, the software is among the best.

by Warren Ernst