Software update: Zoom Player 4.00 beta 3

Inmatrix has released a new beta of Zoom Player from the 4.00 industry, namely beta 3† This multimedia player plays a wide variety of multimedia files, and offers all kinds of additional functions to make watching a movie as enjoyable as possible. Zoom Player is available in two flavors, namely Zoom Player Standard and Zoom Player Professional† The former is free and unlimited to use, but lacks some of the features that its professional brother does. The changelog is as follows:

The Navigator Interfaces have been rewritten from scratch. Most of the functionality has remained the same, but the graphical elements have a clearer look and are now skinnable. Here are the usability changes:

The File Navigator

The Playlist Navigator:

The Media Library Navigator:

Other changes:

• Double clicking on the file name area will now switch between Audio mode and DVD Mode.
• New Setting (Advanced Options / Control Bar / Settings) allowing you to limit the control bar so that it only shows up on mouse movement when in fullscreen mode.
• Two new skin variables “tLineFontHeight” and “cBarFontHeight” which are superseding “tLineFontSize” and “cBarFontSize” which were ill suited for Large Fonts. Support for the older variable remains to keep compatibility with old fonts.
• Zoom Player can now associate and play CellPhone 3GPP (.3GP) s263 video files (Must have QuickTime installed for it to play).
• You can now associate the OptimFROG (.OFR) extension and play OptimFROG files once you have the decoder installed. OptimFROG is yet another lossless audio compression format (in the nature of APE and FLAC). You can get the OptimFROG decoder here:
• Audio DSP should take less CPU power, especially under SSE/SSE2 capable processors.
• The playback from archive formats now has a checkbox which allows you to select whether the file extension should be looked at to determine if the file is an archive, or if the whole file name should be evaluated (in a case where the file name might actually contain the string, such as “my_music_albw.mp3” or “audio.zip.mp3”).
• The Segment Matching Code has been enhanced to support “
• ” masking. This new method only works when used at the end of the mask. For example, a mask of “x??.
• ” would match the following:
• Andromeda.4×01.answers_given_to_questions_never_asked.avi
• Andromeda.4×02.pieces_of_eight.mpg
• Andromeda.4×03.waking_the_tyrants_device.avi

And so forth…

• SHOUTcast Playback should now be more reliable, Zoom Player will now try the alternate servers if one fails to connect.
• The “System” Options dialog entry has been replaced with a “Formats” entry. The content of the previous “System” dialog has been moved to the “System Overview” tab within the new “Formats” section. Another tab on the formats section now contains a list of detected missing playback components with links to where you can download and get more information about each component/format.
• Zoom Player can now detect if Flash or QuickTime is missing and inform you on the “Missing Formats” page.
• New “function” parameter on the “DrawExText” skinning function allowing you to specify a double-click function for text labels.
• If Windows Animation is enabled (in windows), Zoom Player will no longer animate the window when going fullscreen or when minimizing as it’s not very elegant.
• Vowel decimation is now used to ensure ID3 display fits within the display area.
• The Resize Navigator now displays the current Video Aspect Ratio.
• You can now select the Custom Mouse Wheel function from a list instead of manually typing it in.
• Extracting from archive didn’t work for unicode archive names.
• Using Zoom Player to execute external files could cause certain Zoom Player features to stop responding.
• The Control Bar and TimeLine fonts should now appear properly when Windows is set to 120dpi Large Fonts.