It is not that often that we get a chance to take an early look at the next generation of Blu-ray (BD) playback software for the home theater PC (HTPC) so when ArcSoft offered us the chance to review Total Media Theatre 5 (TMT5) we could not say no, even though the timeline was very aggressive. Fortunately we can report that BD playback is excellent (including frame sequential 3D with a supported NVIDIA GPU), and the frameless video surface TMT5 uses for video playback looks great and gives the application a slight edge in picture quality versus the competition. Unfortunately, it does not reach feature parity with the ease of use a dedicated hardware player can provide, missing two critical features -- automatic refresh rate and channel configuration matching.