Download Zoom Player 8.50 RC1

Inmatrix has released the first release candidate of version 8.50 of the Zoom Player media player. Zoom Player is available in Home Free, Home Professional and Home Max flavors, with the latter two costing $40 and $60 respectively. Only the Pro and Max versions of this release candidate are currently available. on this page the different versions are compared. Version 8.50 includes the following changes and improvements:

New:

• The Onyx (default) skin has undergone a modernization process, making the icons clearer, sharper and everything a little more intuitive.
• Introducing the ‘Alba HD’ skin. A clean elegant white design for higher resolution screens, Alba HD is 25% higher resolution than Default while retaining all the functionality.
  Alba HD replaces the Fusion skin, still available for download through the Zoom Player Skin Gallery.
• Confirmation dialogs are now skinned by default with new skin script parameters that control their appearance.
• Under Windows 7 (or newer), the Taskbar thumbnail, which appears when hovering with the mouse cursor over the Zoom Player task bar button now features 4 functions:
  • mute
  • Previous Chapter/Track
  • Play / Pause
  • Next Chapter/Track
• The Install center can now install language packs.
• The Install Center now remembers the ‘Silent Installer’ and ‘Automatic Configuration’ checkbox values ​​after restarting.
• The Play History cache (used to store last media position and display the play history) has been rewritten from scratch, performance has been greatly improved.
• New Short,Medium,Long seeking buttons option on the Control Bar when using the default skin.
• New Settings “Adv. Options / Playback / Audio / Visualizations” that control whether visualization displays when playing audio or video media.
• New Setting “Adv. Options / Playback / History” used to override the Play History cache file save path.
  By specifying a shared network path, media can be pause on one computer and playback resumed on a second computer.
• New Setting “Adv. Options / Playback / History” to automatically save the play history cache on pause.
• New Setting “Adv. Options / Playback / Paths & Files” that controls whether archive files are automatically extracted and played when opening an entire drive or folder.
  In previous versions, opening and playing of archive files was always on and could cause stability or accidentally unforseen consequences (long extraction times).
• New Setting “Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Settings” that when enabled, add a ‘Randomly Play all files in this directory’ entry to the Media Library and File Browsing navigation interfaces.
  When used, the function adds all the files in the current directory to the play list and then sorts the playlist randomly before beginning playback, making it very useful when playing music.
• New Setting “Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Settings” that overrides the “Open File” dialog, accessible through the main user interface, the right-click context menu and by pressing the “O” key with the fullscreen file navigation interface .
• New “Very Long Seek” Backward and Forward functions using the Ctrl+Shift+”,” and Ctrl+Shift+”.” keyboard macros.
  By default the seek action is 10 minutes. This value is adjustable through the Advanced Options dialog under the [Playback / Controls] sub menu.
• New Function “fnMainContextMenu” that opens the right-click context menu used by the main user interface.
• New Function “fnPLContextMenu” that opens the right-click context menu used by the playlist editor user interface.
• New Function “fnResetBalance” that resets the Audio Left/Right balance to the center.
• New function “fnResetPlayRate” that resets the Play Rate to normal speed.
• The Playlist editor’s scroll bar background is now skinnable. For more information, visit the skinning tutorial.
• The Playlist editor’s search-box font and background are now skinnable. For more information, visit the skinning tutorial.
• The Playlist editor’s scroll bar widget is now skinnable with an Alpha (translucency) bitmap, as used by the modernized default onyx skin.
• The Skin Script ‘CreateExButton’ function has been enhanced to support a disabled button state image.
• The Skin Script ‘CreateExButton’ function has a new parameter that adds finer button animation smoothness control.
• The Skin Script ‘CreateExButton’ function has a new parameter that adds auto-repeat capabilities with a custom repeat rate value.
• When running “Zoom Player FREE” with a Zoom Player PRO or MAX activation key installed, a notification dialog asking you to install the version matching the key now appears.

Changes:

• The Playlist editor’s scroll widget now moves smoothly.
• The Auto-Update feature no longer notifies you of new components on the Install Center if the new components are not automatically enabled. In the previous version, an update to a language pack would display a ‘new component’ notification window.
• If you previously used a Zoom Player trial version and the evaluation period ended, Installation the latest version lets you re-evaluate Zoom Player for another 30 days.
• The Extended menu fullscreen navigation interface has been cleaned, removing functionality that exists in other navigation interfaces and adding better structuring to the stream selection options.
• The ‘Opening a drive or directory includes opening image files’ setting is now disabled by default (applies to old and new installations). You can re-enable the feature in the options dialog.
• The Equalizer preset editor has been redesigned.
• The Red error message dialogs are now skinned with an improved layout.
• Auto-Update notification now issues a notification that a new final version has been released if you are currently running a beta version.
• The Playlist editor’s search box now uses the Advanced Playlist Control’s search method (‘starting with’ or ‘containing’ text). Previously, all searches were based on ‘starting with’ text.
• The default change value for the volume up/down functions is now “4%”, replacing the previous “5%” default.
• Changing the play rate using the play rate bar now pops an OSD listing the play speed.
• Smoother Audio Track folder image updates when using the ‘PgUp/PgDn’ keyboard macros to play the ‘previous/next’ audio track in a directory.
• Right-clicking the fixed clock display now hides it.
• Version display is now more consistent with web (8.1.x vs. 8.1x). API version structure remains the same for backward compatibility.
• The keyboard editor no longer shows scan code character value for MultiMedia keys (since multimedia keys are not mapped to characters).
• A few optimizations to the skin parsing code.
• With the new Play History caching optimizations, the Advanced Options [Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Settings – Highlight previously viewed files] is now fast enough to work with large (1000’s of files) directories on modern hardware.

Fixes:

• When using Windows 7 with a non-default Font DPI value (125%/150%), Windows incorrectly scaled the user interfaces, causing the interfaces to appear blurred and preventing Zoom Player from covering the windows task bar in fullscreen mode.
• The Random Play feature wasn’t as random as it should have been. Zoom Player now tries not to repeat the same track until at least 50% the number of items in the playlist have played.
• The playlist editor’s items were not vertically centered inside their box, this was especially evident when using large playlist fonts.
• The wrong folder image was used when playing audio media. The first image in the folder was used instead of the ‘Background image search mask’ value specified in the adv. options.
• The ‘Open Drive’ and ‘Add Directory’ functions would accidentally add non-media files if their file extension was a sub-set of a proper media file extension.
• Fixed a bug introduced in v8.1.5 that listed all file sizes as “0 bytes” in the play history.
• The ‘Open Drive’ dialog did not allow you to select the first drive in the list.
• Opening a folder from the playlist editor ignored the setting that controlled whether image files are loaded and always included images.
• The Scene Cut ‘Mute Audio’ feature is now more accurate, especially when seeking into an area marked as muted.
• Fixed a skin color-tinting bug in skins that did not contain fully skinned dialogs (Playlist, Equalizer, etc).
• Fixed several crashes that occurred when playing an audio file while in fullscreen and then resizing the folder image down to a postage stamp size.
• Fixed a crash in the Chapter editor when playing a media file with embedded chapters containing a negative time frame.
• The Play History databases will no longer corrupt if you see a message saying ‘Zoom Player has failed integrity check’.
• When the “Pause playback when minimizing the player window while playing video content” was enabled, playback didn’t pause if the Zoom Player task-bar button was hidden.
• Certain ripped DVDs with a modified VIDEO_TS.IFO file would play and stop in an infinite loop.
• Fixed a small crash that caused a ‘ding’ sound to be heard just as Zoom Player was closing when ‘On Playlist Complete’ was set to ‘Close Player’.
• The user interface maximized window state was lost when minimizing with Zoom Player only showing in the System Tray.
• Pressing Alt+Enter after clicking an item in the playlist editor caused that item to play instead of going fullscreen.
• The Smart Play profile for the ‘VP7’ video format accidentally included an ffdshow entry (ffdshow doesn’t decode VP7 video).
• When a text formatting error occurs due to a translation error in a language pack, it is now caught instead of displaying an unclear message and a possible crash.
• Trying to use the ‘/config’, ‘/datapath’, ‘/multinst’ and ‘/winname’ command line parameters in Zoom Player FREE or PRO would crash the player instead of showing a notification screen that these command lines require Zoom Player MAX .
• When opening a media file from a network path, hovering with the mouse cursor over the task bar button or system tray icon would show the file name with full network path when only the file name should have displayed.
• A few text elements in the Open Directory and Open Drive dialogs were not translatable.
• Setting a custom mouse/keyboard function that opened the Volume Bar would crash with an ‘out of system resources’ error.
• The ‘Disabled’ subtitle track was not initially selected when no subtitles were visible by default.
• When maximizing the player window and then minimizing the player window to the taskbar, the maximized window state and the previous window size were lost.
• The “Fix window movement glitches” setting that was used to work-around a window glitch that caused the player window to jump when trying to move the player window by clicking on the video area is now disabled by default (even for users who previously had this feature enabled).
  An alternative fix is ​​now in place that should hopefully resolve the jumping window issue without having to enable this setting.
• The Options dialog search function results prevented certain buttons from being accessible while the search results were visible.
• The Options dialog search function now supports unicode text.
• The options dialog’s Help button’s context menu now supports unicode text.
• A Zoom Player tab would briefly appear on the desktop when running Zoom Player with a windows shell other than ‘explorer.exe’.
• The #1601 API message returning the number of audio tracks for the playing media returned the wrong number at times.
• Under certain conditions, the ‘filter properties’ sub-menu would list filters with a ‘#2’ suffix even though there was only one instance of the filter in the graph.

The following downloads are available:
Zoom Player Home Professional 8.50 RC1
Zoom Player Home Max 8.50 RC1