Legend : "*" = New "+" = Change "-" = Fix --- What's new in Zoom Player v18 beta 5: New : * You can now select IPTV streams as favorites and they automatically show up under a "Favorites" group at the start of the stream list. You can right click a favorite stream to re-arrange or sort your favorites list or simply remove the stream from the favorites section. * You can now hide IPTV groups from being listed by right-clicking the group and selecting "Hide Group" or through the options dialog. * Right-clicking an IPTV EPG entry will now show the program's description and allow you to set a notification to remind you that the program is about to start as well as specify that you want to automatically switch to the program's stream in due time. Notifications are remembered even if you close and re-open Zoom Player, but they will not activate if Zoom Player is not running. * New Hidden IPTV Group controls (Adv. Options / Playback / IPTV). * New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Control Bar / Timeline Area) that allows you to control whether the timeline displays the current playlist track number. You can also toggle this setting through the control bar menu by right-clicking the timeline with nothing playing (or middle-clicking if something is playing). * The Advanced Playlist Control interface is now accessible through the right-click menu under the "Open Interface" section. Change : + Optimized EPG parsing, improving load time by 5-15%. + The playlist editor's search feature has been enhanced to support repeated search. Simply press Enter to cycle between all entries that contain the searched term. + The Station Manager window now has an "X" in the corner to close the window (previously you had to click the "close" button). Fixes : - The Media Libary's category editor's "Playlist" category option did not display categories correctly if they had certain unicode characters in the name (e.g. Emojis). --- What's new in Zoom Player v18 beta 4: New : * The IPTV auto-updating EPG and Stream List downloads can now handle ".zip" and ".gz" archive URLs (e.g. "https://website.com/epg.zip"). * New Filter EPG feature on the IPTV interface. * New IPTV setting (Adv. Options / Playback / IPTV) that controls the EPG font size. * New IPTV setting (Adv. Options / Playback / IPTV) to control whether the EPG filter checks program description or only the program's title. * New "Custom Action" button on the main window (near the top-left) that allows you to set any standard Zoom Player function to the button. By default this button opens the new IPTV interface. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface) that allows you to assign a function to the new "Custom Action" button. Fixes : - The IPTV interface should feel a bit smoother (less flickering). - In the media library's category editor, specifying a category name containing unicode characters would not highlight the entry in the category list after clicking. - Media Title containing certain unicode characters (e.g. emoji) did not show when loading some playlist formats (m3u, asx, b4s, wpl). --- What's new in Zoom Player v18 beta 3: New : * The IPTV interface now supports automatically downloading stream lists and electronic program guide URLs every specified number of days. * IPTV Stream icons are now downloaded automatically. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / IPTV) allowing you to control the Stream's icon size. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / IPTV) allowing you to control whether the Stream's text is resized along with the icon size. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / IPTV) to ignore grouping and just display the entire stream list. * New Settings (Adv. Options / Playback / IPTV) to customize the IPTV interface with your own color scheme. Change : + If an IPTV stream list contains mixed information with some streams lacking a group specification, all such streams will now show under an "Unspecified" group. If only one or no groups are specified, grouping is disabled automatically. --- What's new in Zoom Player v18 beta 2: New : * A completely new IPTV (streaming live TV and VOD) interface (Adv. Options / Playback / IPTV) with support for EPG (Electronic Program Guide), Channel Grouping and many customization options. Some features (icons, automated EPG/M3U downloads, etc) are still a work in progress and are not part of this beta. * New setting (enabled by default) to automatically hide the control bar when clicking the video area, making it much easier to quickly hide the control bar. * You can now edit the last play time and date directly from the media library meta-data editor. Fixes : - Using unicode characters in the ISO Auto-Mount command would not save the path properly after restarting Zoom Player. - The Advanced Options "System Sounds" and "Audio" sections did not scroll smoothly when using the scroll bar. --- What's new in Zoom Player v17.5 beta 1: New : * Two new settings (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Customization) that allow you to override the poster image and backdrop for Movies and TV show categories. The backdrop setting is an easy override, just place a "backdrop.jpg" or "fanart.jpg" in the same folder and Zoom Player will use it automatically. Updating a movie poster image requires you enable the "Do not use scraped image as thumbnail / backdrop" setting for each of the media library's TV or Movie categories, otherwise the poster image will still use the scraped image (due to image-caching maintaining a copy of the old image) and then re-scrape the movie folder. --- What's new in Zoom Player v17.2 release candidate 1: New : * The Media Library category editor has been redesigned for clarity and ease of use. * The Media Library category editor can now be used to select and re-order multiple categories in one click, making it much easier and faster to re-order categories. * The Media Library category editor has been extended with a "Move top" and "Move bottom" buttons to more easily arrange your category listing. * New "Sort by Runtime" media library feature. In TV categories it sorts by the number of episodes in a folder and in Movie categories it sorts by the Movie's specified Runtime (not the media's duration which may include additional content such as credits). Fixes : - Fixed an issue in the Media Library filtering function that would allow entries with a similar enough Collection/Tag to the active filter to be listed. - Fixed a "Plugin ERROR #80004005" when trying to add a YouTube channel to the media library category editor if the channel's URL contained the "@" character, e.g. "https://www.youtube.com/@WeMightBeDrunkPod" --- What's new in Zoom Player v17.2 beta 3: New : * Support for a new YouTube LIVE URL structure, usually used when sharing a video the YouTube mobible app. Example: https://www.youtube.com/live/L5QXreqOrTA?feature=share * New "Edit Last Played" option added to the windowed play history's right-click menu, allowing you to manually edit the "Last Played" field without actually playing the media. --- What's new in Zoom Player v17.2 beta 2: New : * New "Filter by Star Rating" media library feature. Filtering by Star Rating allows you to filter TV and Movie categories based on the media's Star Rating. You can easily customize each media's star rating to your own personal value using the integrated metadata editor, accessible by right-clicking a media's thumbnail or through the media library's functions page. * New "Filter by Content Rating" media library feature. Filtering by Content Rating allows you to filter TV and Movie categories based on the MPAA rating assigned to the TV Show or Movie, for example "PG-13" or "TV-MA". * New "Hide Mouse Cursor in Windowed mode" setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Mouse / Setting) that allows the mouse cursor to auto-hide even when playing in a window (disabled by default). Fixes : - Wrote a work-around for a bug in Media Portal's TS File Reader filter to prevent Zoom Player from freezing on re-play. The bug prevents ZP from seeking to 0 and re-playing by returning invalid media position values, requiring the media to be fully reloaded. - Under some conditions, the media library's filter function would not highlight any of the available filtering options and would draw the scrollbar widget in the wrong position. - Under some conditions, the media library's filter function would not bring the active filtering mode into view. --- What's new in Zoom Player v17.2 beta 1: New : * New "Resume Playback" media library feature that's accessible from the media library's functions page and the media library's mini-menu (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Thumb View). Resume playback looks for the first unwatched media in the folder and then resumes playback from that media. If no media from the folder has been previously played, it will play the first media in the folder (in alphabetical order by Title or File name). If the last played media in the folder is over the "Consider media as watched" percentage threshold, the next media will play in alphabetical order by title (if previously scraped), otherwise by file name. * Added support for new YouTube URL format when adding YouTube channels as media library categories: Example: https://www.youtube.com/@CowboyKentRollins * Double-clicking a TV show thumbnail in the media library's TV Jukebox mode will now play the episode. Change : + Zoom Player no longer requires "freeimage.dll" to load. The library which is used to display the ".WEBP" image format is now loaded dynamically as-needed, saving a bit of RAM while allowing Zoom Player to start slightly faster. Fixes : - The media library's unplayed media counter will now adjust the background box size if the unwatched media counter is 3 digits or more. - Fixed a bug that prevented the media library's right/left bump actions from working after a PC was not reset for over a month. - Some information was not displayed correctly in the media library for YouTube channels containing the "|" character in their channel name, video names or video description. - Fixed a bug causing ".df" definition files not to save properly when playing from shared network paths (e.g. "\\my_server\shared_folder\media.mkv"). --- What's new in Zoom Player v17.1 beta 2: New : * New "Display thumbnail season progression bar" setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Thumbnail Cust.) that shows a season progression bar (similar to the last play position bar) in TV Show category based on the number of watched/unwatched episodes in a folder. * New "Reset" option in each individual media library filtering mode (Genre, Tag and Collection). * Two new Pixel Shader scripts you can use with MadVR as the video renderer to flip the video both horizontally and vertically. Change : + Filtering the media library will now reset the selected entry to the first item, unless the "Auto-select last viewed file/folder on entering a folder" setting is enabled, in which case the last viewed file or folder is selected automatically. --- What's new in Zoom Player v17.1 beta 1: New : * New "Display unwatched counter on TV Show category folders" setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Thumbnail Cust.) that counts the number of unwatched episodes in "TV Show" categories and displays the count in a corner on the folder's thumbnail. * Full customization for the TV Show unwatched counter: 1. Size (relative to thumbnail) 2. Margins (relative to Size) 3. Font Color 4. Background Color Change : + If you previously used a download tracking plugin, you must now re-enable it. Plugins were previously enabled by default which could have caused delays when exiting Zoom Player. + Having ZP set to automatically show the media library when opening will no longer show the media library if a media was set to load using the command line. + Zoom Player will no longer display the default background image if a media is set to load via command line, removing the slight flicker of the image and slightly speeding up load time. Fixes : - Setting Zoom Player to pre-load fullscreen navigation graphics while trying to play a media from command line could cause ZP to freeze. - When taking a screenshot of the playing video (Alt+F), the generated filename included a wrong position value (just the file name, the image was taken from the correct position). - The "Stop function closes streaming media (instead of just stopping)" setting was accidentally applied to every playing media and not only live streams. - Fixed a bug that would break URL links in the active playlist when closing and then re-opening Zoom Player. --- What's new in Zoom Player v17 release candidate 2: New : * New "Sort by Star Rating" media library sort option (Only works on scraped media [TV & Movies]). You can adjust the Movie/TV Show's star rating using the metadata editor. Fixes : - There was a bug in v17 RC1 that caused play history to break when playing streaming content and possibly in other cases. --- What's new in Zoom Player v17 release candidate 1: New : * The mouse's backward and forward button can now be assigned custom functionality when a navigation interface is visible. * YouTube kids URLs should now work with the IFRAME player. * New "Sort by Release Date" media library sort option (Only works on scraped media [TV & Movies]). * New "Sort by Sort Title" media library sort option (Only works on scraped media [TV & Movies]). This sorting mode allows you to use the meta-data editor to specify an "invisible" custom title that Zoom Player will use for sorting. When no sorting title is specified, Zoom Player automatically uses the media'a title (if one exists) or file name. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Settings) that controls whether filtering lists in the media library can use multiple parameters (e.g. "Genre" and "Tag") at the same time. * New "9:16" thumbnail aspect ratio option for media library thumbnails suitable to vertical videos. * New configuration option for TheMovieDB scraping plugin that allows you to select the poster/backdrop/still image sizes. * New "Edit Metadata" option in the media library's functions page for TV and Movie categories. Fixes : - Play history features such as "resume playback" and "previous play position on thumbnails" did not function on files with over 128 characters. - Playing files with over 128 characters in their name created duplicate play history entries. - You could actually click on media library path icons even when they were invisible in the category list. - When viewing the media library's categories page, you could click above/below the scroll-bar area and it would still affect the scroll position. --- What's new in Zoom Player v17 beta 4: New : * New metadata editor accessible by right-clicking TV or Movie entries in the media library. The metadata editor allows you to replace thumbnails and backdrops along with editing the Title, Release date, Overview, Genre, Tags and Collections. * New media library filtering by Genre, Tags and Collections. Accessible through the functions menu or by clicking the new "funnel shape" filter icon in the path area. Filtering is remembered on a per-category basis and is stored across sessions (even after exiting Zoom Player). * The media library mini-menu has been extended with two new functions you can select : "Filter list" and "Edit metadata". Fixes : - Under some conditions, pressing the ESC/Menu keys to close the right-click context menu would break some keyboard functionality. --- What's new in Zoom Player v17 beta 3: New : * New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / Video / Subtitles) that limits the "next subtitle" feature to specified languages. For example to limit the subtitle tracks to Spanish, English and Directory Commentary, you only need to specify "spa;eng;dir" and any subtitle track not containing these values will by skipped when switching to the next subtitle track. * New "exSetAudioSync" extended function that allows you to set a positive or negative millisecond accurate audio synchronization offset. * Added support for YouTube Shorts URL parsing and playback, for example: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5TTNpKFy_10 Change : + YouTube media library plugins no longer return a star rating or dislike count since YouTube removed public dislike data. + The "Pause playback when minimizing the player window while playing video content" setting is now ignored for live streams with no duration specified as it just caused the stream to close. + Disabled the Startup sound if a media was already in the process of loading. + The Media Library's function page is now more dynamic, removing entries that may not be useful in some contexts (e.g. using plugins). + TheMovieDB scraper plugin will now download movie poster images at full resolution (previously limited to 500x750px). This change means you will see sharper looking posters on 4K displays. This fix requires that you re-scrape movies to download the higher resolution poster images. Fixes : - Seeking Ahead/Back on YouTube streams using the IFRAME player would reset the play position to 0 if the windows decimal separator was set to something other than ".". - Restoring last play position for YouTube videos played using the IFRAME player did not function currently on some PCs with a slower internet connection. - Displaying the current video resolution on the timeline while using the YouTube IFRAME playback engine displayed a fixed value instead of the value returned by the YouTube IFRAME engine. - The "Open Media Library" button on the Media Library category editor did not function if the category mode was set to view all (prism). - YouTube channels containing the "&" character in the name would not show the correct channel name under some conditions. - Fixed a cosmetic bug in the play history dialog that would show the current position with a negative value. - Edits to the playlist using the playlist editor should now be reflected in the advanced playlist control interface. - The playing information fullscreen navigation interface was not updating in real time and didn't update at all when playing new SHOUTcast content. - The "Open Drive" feature broke down for multiple use cases, including using Zoom Player to auto-play a drive. - The Media Library's "mark as seen:archive" option will now close the currently playing media if it's being archived. --- What's new in Zoom Player v16.6 beta 2: New : * New ".ISO" drive mounting and playback settings to help automate the process of mounting ISO images and playing their content. An external mounting tool (such as Virtual CloneDrive) is required. Accessible under "Adv. Options / File Format Assocation / File Extensions." Please note that with this change, it is no longer possible to extract and play ISO files as if they were archives. * The ".WEBP" image format is now supported when using the internal image decoder. * New feature that replaces the TV Jukebox thumbnail for the currently playing media with the currently displayed image. This feature is limited to "TV Shows" media library categories and can be triggered through the Alt+Ctrl+"F" keyboard macro and the "fnCaptureScrapedImage" function. * New Media Library feature to sort categories by Play Date. When enabled the most recently played files (or folders containing files that have been played) will be listed first. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Playlist) to automatically hide the Playlist editor when entering fullscreen mode. Change : + When using the Media Library's Cut/Copy/Paste functionality, Performing a "Paste" operation in the root virtual folder of a category containing multiple folders, ZP will now try to paste the file(s) to a folder on the same drive when possible and only use the folder of the currently highlighted entry if no folders in the pasted category are on the same drive. + ISO files are now always visible in media library video categories. Fixes : - When the setting to show file extensions in the navigation interfaces was disabled, URLs appeared cropped in the play history fullscreen navigation interface. - Opening a subtitle file for a playing video when using MadVR as the video renderer could cause the video to appear in a new window. - Fixed a bug in TV jukebox mode that prevented some file meta-data from displaying when the file name contained unicode characters. --- What's new in Zoom Player v16.6 beta 1: Fixes : - Bug fixes --- What's new in Zoom Player v16.5 release candidate 1: New : * New Smart Play profile for the Apple ProRes codecs. * New setting (Adv. Options / Playback) to select the web engine used to render the YouTube IFRAME player, either the old Edge Chakra engine or the newer (and much better quality) Edge Chromium. Please note that that Edge Chromium requires the WebView2 component installed. WebView2 comes pre-installed in Windows 11 and is an optional download for Windows 10. The WebView2 component is available for download directly from Microsoft or using Zoom Player's install center application. Change : + The YouTube IFRAME player's preferred video quality setting has been removed as YouTube depreciated this feature. Fixes : - The YouTube IFRAME player did not function properly in regions using the "," character as a decimal separator. - Pressing "Stop" twice to perform a Stop/Resume action did not work when using the YouTube IFRAME player. - When customizing the media library to use full height in combination with the category display set to list mode, using the Up/Down arrows at the Start/End of the category list would not roll-over to the Start/End of the list correctly. --- What's new in Zoom Player v16.5 release candidate 1: New : * Introducing Charcoal, Zoom Player's new default skin. Charcoal includes the same layout and functionality as the previous Onyx default skin but uses more subtle shading and cleaner elements to better fit with Windows 10's look and feel. The onyx skin is still shipping with Zoom Player, you can switch back by opening the skin selection dialog using the "N" keyboard macro or through the right-click menu. * It is now possible to play videos from Twitch.tv. * New "Mark as Seen" media library feature accessible through the functions menu (toggle the cogwheel, or right-arrow in list mode). When marking media or entire folders as seen, you will be prompted to "Mark as seen now" or "Mark as seen archive". Depending on your choice the marked entries will appear at the start or end of the play history list. * New "Select all Unseen" media library feature that selects every media or folder containing content that exists in the play history. * New "Select all Seen" media library feature that selects every media or folder containing content that does not exist in the play history. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Settings) that controls whether the Media Library's media scraping indicator is visible within the path area. Change : + A major redesign of the media library's scraping operation. Scraping of new content should no longer block thumbnail and meta-data updates for previously scraped content. This change should help Zoom Player feel more responsive. + Rewrote the audio TAG/ID3 scraping code for enhanced efficiency and reliability. + The file meta-data edit window's title now features only the file name and not the full path. + The media library's YouTube Playlist plugin is now more flexible when parsing YouTube playlist URL structures. YouTube uses multiple URL structures to present playlists and now the plugin should support all of them. + The "Force the navigation list or thumb view display to full width" and "Force the navigation list or thumb view to maximum width" settings now apply to the path area and not only to the media area. Fixes : - Fixed a hidden crash that destabilized Zoom Player when closing the media library while the thumb view was in the process of smooth scrolling. - You can no longer open the windowed go to time/chapter editor if no media is currently playing. - YouTube has a bug in it's API that can cause duplicate entries to show when loading more entries. Previously in such cases, Zoom Player didn't show a thumbnail for a duplicate entry, at least this bug is fixed, can't do much about YouTube's API bugs. - The media library's scraping counter did not update if you exit the folder the current scraping operations were working on until the screen was updated. - Stopped the Create Ringtone function from attempting to work with network streams (it never worked with URLs, but still allowed you to select the position and fill in details into the save dialog). - Fixed a rare case where there media library would not respond to input correctly when playing a movie then exiting to the main navigation interface and then back to the media library. - Fixed a few small memory leaks. --- What's new in Zoom Player v16.1 beta 3: New : * The navigation Sound FX are now applied to every navigation interface. Change : + Replaced the "Right arrow" icon with an "Enter" icon on the mini color control interface. Fixes : - Fixed a cosmetic glitch in the media scanner that caused paths to draw over icons. - Setting the image slideshow duration for loaded images to "0" would show an incorrect timeline "remaining time" value. --- What's new in Zoom Player v16.1 beta 2: New : * New "Confirm when resuming playback from previous position" setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Settings) to request confirmation before resuming playback from the last saved position when playing media from a TV or Movie media library category. Please note, this setting is on by default and requires play history enabled to function. Change : + The erase playing media and fullscreen navigation erase dialogs will now display the media's title alongside the file name. + Double-clicking the media library's category entries in list-view mode now performs an "Enter" navigation action instead of "Right". Fixes : - With the "Disable the Control Bar in Window Mode" setting enabled, exiting fullscreen would briefly show the control bar. - When Two movie folders shared a similar base name (e.g. "Men in Black" and "Men in Black 2"), the wrong progress bar position would show for the first folder. --- What's new in Zoom Player v16.1 beta 1: New : * New interface Sound-FX system that triggers sounds when certain actions are taken (Adv. Options / Interface / Sounds) : 1. Zoom Player Startup. 2. Navigation motion (left/right/up/down). 3. Navigation actions (enter/back/esc). 4. Seeking (forward/backward/tracks). 5. Edge-Bump (media library). You can pick the volume level and the output sound device and limit some of the sounds if a video is playing or when using the mouse. * The media library can now display a media file's approximate bitrate (e.g. 9.2 Mpbs). You will need to re-scrape media to see this update. * You can now search for subtitles on movie folders, Zoom Player will use the first video file within the folder to find matching subtitle tracks. * New "Thumbnail icon size" setting (Adv. Options / Playback / Fullscreen Navigation / Customization) that controls the thumbnail media icon size for media/icons that do not have a thumbnail image. * New "Prevent mouse actions from moving or resizing the main window" setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Position & Size" that blocks the mouse from resizing or moving the main player window. * New "Skip requesting confirmation to erase file" setting (Adv. Options / Interface) to remove the confirmation request when erasing the playing media to the recycle bin. * New "Do not use scraped image as thumbnail" media library category setting. When enabled, Zoom Player will ignore any thumbnail downloaded using a scraping plugin and depending on other category settings, Zoom Player will try extracting a thumbnail from the video itself. * New "Do not use MediaInfo.dll to extract file metadata" media library category setting. When enabled, Zoom Player will not try to use MediaInfo.dll to extract metadata from files such as file format, codec, audio channels, etc. * New "exPLSortOrder" extended function capable of choosing the sorting order (ascending, descending). A value of "0" sets ascending and "1" sets descending. Please note that this function doesn't actually sort the list. * New "exPLSort" extended function to sort the current playlist. Possible values are: 0 : Sort by Name 1 : Sort by File Type (file extension) 2 : Sort by File Date 3 : Sort by File Size 4 : Sort by File Path (folder) 5 : Sort by Media Duration (in seconds) 6 : Sort Randomly (random order) * New "exPLRemoveItem" extended function that allows you to directly remove a playlist item. Please note that the first item in the playlist is actually "0" and not "1". Change : + When reaching the top/bottom position in the media library's thumbnail view, Zoom Player now tries to maintain the current column when the top/bottom bump bar is triggered twice to perform a scroll to top/bottom action. + Improved support for long paths (over 250 characters) in the media library and file browsing fullscreen navigation interfaces (especially over network shared paths). + The minimum number of media library category columns has been changed from 3 to 2. Fixes : - With the "opening media library always selects the playing media" setting enabled, renaming a file or creating a new folder could change the active path. - Fixed high-DPI issues with unskinned confirmation dialogs. - Fixed an erroneous OSD notification when using the media library's mini-menu to add a category "refresh" or "append" entries to the playlist. - Fixed an issue that caused the media library to freeze if there were missing bitmap files in the navigation skin folder. - While in fullscreen mode, clicking on the playlist editor or equalizer windows when positioned over a hot-corner would activate the hot-corner action. - Opening a streaming YouTube URL using DirectShow would not show the video's title in the play history until after the video was closed. - Showing the control bar for the very first time showed a black rectangle in the top left corner of the screen for a split second. - Fixed a crash in the Media Library's playlist category plugin when parsing certain ".m3u" playlists. - When using the media library's refresh button on a plugin based category, it accidentally cleared the media's titles. - The option dialog's audio visualization configuration options were completely broken. - The "fnRestart" and "fnRestartWithParam" functions restarted Zoom Player without first saving settings, which caused the restarted copy to revert some settings. - Playing a network shared file from command line would miss an external subtitle file in the same folder and no subtitles were shown. --- What's new in Zoom Player v16 release candidate 2: New : * Optimized drawing of media library category thumbnails, up-to 43% faster. * Optimized drawing of media library media thumbnails, up-to 38% faster. * Optimized the time it takes to open the media library, in some cases up-to 50% faster. * Optimized loading of the playcache file by up-to 17%, which should help Zoom Player open faster when storing play history over a long duration. * Rewrote scroll update polling to improve smoothness when scrolling within the media library's thumbnail view. * Due to a bug fix (see below) and optimizations to the code, Zoom Player should close a little bit faster. * Media library folder based categories are now sorted on a per-folder basis. When entering a folder for the first time, it will always start sorted by name, but any change to the sorting mode will now persist without affecting other folders in the category. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface) that uses the fullscreen navigation UI to confirm when deleting the currently playing file. * You can now sort the media library in Random order. * You can now sort the media library by "Remaining Play Time" based on a percentage of the media's remaining play remaining. * When going up to the base folder in the file browsing fullscreen navigation interface, there is now a "Return to path list" option to make navigation more intuitive. Change : + The "Auto-select last viewed file/folder on entering a folder" setting now works better when used in combination with the "Nav-Enter on media library category list opens the category at the root folder" setting. + When both "Auto-select last viewed file/folder on entering a folder" and "Nav-Enter on media library category list opens the category at the root folder" settings are enabled, entering a category will highlight the folder containing the last played file. + APE audio duration is now retrieved by default when adding ".ape" files to the playlist. For existing Zoom Player users, to enable this feature you must click the "default" button next to the "Auto-Get Duration" section of the Advanced Options' "File Extension" page. + The play history's "Erase" entries has been renamed to "Remove from Play History" to make it clearer the files themselves are not touched. + Switching to the 'system' sub-menu in the main fullscreen navigation interface will now switch the title from 'main' to 'system'. + Removing the currently playing media from play history will now close the playing media. + When completing playback of a media, the play history dialog and fullscreen navigation interfaces will no longer show a zero position or no position at all and will instead show the media's duration to signify the media has been played all the way through. + You can now use the Home/End keys within the media library fullscreen navigation interface's category filter section to access the top/bottom of the category list. Fixes : - When the current monitor used a high-DPI setting, the icon on confirmation /warning/information dialogs appeared cropped. - Skin tinting did not affect confirmation/warning/information dialogs. - The play position bar in the media library's TV jukebox mode was not properly integrated when the thumbnail frame used round corners like in the Sunset skin. - The file browser fullscreen navigation interface suffered some issues when working with empty drives/root folders. - Fixed multiple issues when trying to erase network shared folders from within the file browsing fullscreen navigation interface: 1. Currently playing file did not close. 2. File was not removed from play history. - The main fullscreen navigation interface's 'system' sub-menu did not show relevant icons, only showing the system icon. - The Advanced Options dialog's "Help / Export" button's pop-up menu did not draw correctly on high-DPI displays. - The playlist's "Open item folder", "Save playing file" and "Rename/Move file" features did not work with network paths. - Deleting all play history entries could leave some entries listed in the dialog until the dialog was closed and reopened. - Trying to show a fullscreen navigation interface while Zoom Player is minimized now restores Zoom Player's window. - The Play History and Play History fullscreen navigation interfaces will now display the play position for the currently playing file correctly. - Creating folder using the file browsing fullscreen navigation interface failed when used under a network path. - Under some conditions, Zoom Player's media cache folder containing scraped metadata and images (thumbnails, posters, backdrops) would prune every time you tried closing Zoom Player, instead of once per week. --- What's new in Zoom Player v16 release candidate 1: New : * New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Customization) to hide the media library's meta-data and category filter sections, using the extra space to display more media. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / History) that controls whether erasing files to the recycle bin also removes their record from the play history. * Pressing the media library's refresh button will also refresh the scraped images, reflecting any manual changes to poster images. Change : + For clarity, the media library's "Select / Unselect" and multiple selection functions have been split into two separate entries. + Opus audio duration is now retrieved when used with an ".ogg" container. + Opus audio duration is now retrieved by default when adding ".opus" files to the playlist. For existing Zoom Player users, to enable this feature you must click the "default" button next to the "Auto-Get Duration" section of the Advanced Options' "File Extension" page. Fixes : - Disabling the "Flash active thumbnail on navigation actions" setting, at times prevented the media library thumbnail view from updating when entering categories. - Switching to audio mode with calibration patterns visible didn't hide the patterns, messing up the UI. - When opening the media library's functions page in an empty category, a cosmetic glitch showing a "-2 B" size would appear in the file size area. - Fixed a few cosmetic issues with residue text remaining on-screen after existing the media library's function menu. --- What's new in Zoom Player v16 beta 4: New : * TheMovieDB.org's media scraper is now capable of scraping U.S. Movie (G/PG/PG-13/R/NC-17) and TV (TV-Y/TV-Y7/TV-G/TV-PG/TV-14/TV-MA) content rating. The content rating appears as an icon next to the other codec/format icons appearing in jukebox mode. You will need to re-scrape your media in order to see content rating on previously scraped media. * TheMovieDB.org's media scraper's configuration can now be set to scrape for "no language" content. * New (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Customization) "Show play position bar on list icons with the this color" setting (disabled by default) * New (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Settings) "Show Previously Played counter in path area" setting that displays the number of yet to be played media within the current media library folder next to the folder's path (disabled by default). * New YouTube Playlist media library plugin which allows you to easily import YouTube playlists as Zoom Player media library categories. * You can now refresh a media library category with a new "Refresh" button to update the display if the folder content was changed in the background. * The navigation skinning engine has been enhanced to add more granular support for the path area's icon size and position. Change : + The fullscreen information navigation interface now splits long information into multiple lines. Fixes : - The caching mechanism for media library category thumbnail caching was mostly broken, not actually caching most of the thumbnails. With this fix, subsequently browsing the category list should be much snappier. - Renaming files/folder in the media library no longer causes the play position to be forgotten and the media no longer requires a re-scrape operation. - The YouTube Channel media library plugin now support YouTube channels that use a slightly different URL structure. For example "https://www.youtube.com/c/TheFighterAndTheKid/videos". It will not work 100% of the time as google didn't release an API call to translate custom channel names to a channel ID required to get a 100% reliable result. For more information, see: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/174903934 - The YouTube Media Library plugins did not take into account time-zone and daylight saving differences when displaying a video's publish time. - The Adjust Image fullscreen navigation interface did not list the active Aspect Ratio correctly. - The fullscreen information navigation interface did not display in the correct width under some conditions. - The full path displayed in the play history fullscreen navigation interface is now correctly truncated to more clearly display long file names. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15.6 beta 3: New : * The media library category editor can now be set to show "All" categories to allow sorting across category types. Fixes : - Clicking the 'show volume bar' button on the control bar showed the volume bar in a slightly-off position. - Disabling the "Flash active thumbnail on navigation actions" setting, prevented the media library thumbnail view from updating when resizing the screen and until a navigation action was triggered. - Network paths specified in the 'File Browser "Network / Disk" mapping' setting no longer allow you to 'folder-up' once reaching the specified base path. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15.6 beta 2: New : * The media library category editor has been restructured. New categories are no longer automatically sorted in alphabetical order and instead always added to the bottom of the category list. New "Move up" and "Move down" buttons now allow you to manually re-order categories. * New "Preferred audio device cycle list" (Adv. Options / Playback / Audio) that allows you to select your preferred audio renderers and quickly switch between them". * New Shift+"A" keyboard macro that switches between audio rendering devices on the Preferred audio device cycle list". * The "Start player in" setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Position & Size) has been split to provide a more granular control of how the player should start. Please note that this change required resetting this setting to it's default value. * Zoom Player's Event Ghost plugin has been updated to support all the latest Zoom Player functions: https://www.eventghost.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3498&p=55891#p55891 Change : + Using the "/LASTNAV" and "/MAINNAV" command line parameters no longer switches the user interface to fullscreen automatically, you must now add the "/F" parameter to maintain the same functionality. + Clicking the media library's "<" button now respects the "Nav-Left goes up a folder before entering the Drive/Category list" setting. + The "Show system library folders in the Media Library Navigator" setting has been removed and replaced by a new button in the media library category editor that lets you add the windows library folders with a single click. With this change, you are now able to easily customize the windows library folders. Fixes : - Restoring after minimizing the user interface from fullscreen mode, no longer restores the user interface to windowed mode instead of fullscreen. - Fixed a freeze when playing JPEG files with malformed exif headers. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15.6 beta 1: New : * New network keep-alive feature (Adv. Options / Playback Files & Paths) that instructs Zoom Player to access the specified paths to make sure a network share does not disconnect for inactivity. Change : + Erasing files/folders from the media library will now erase their scraped meta-data/thumbnail cache from the "MediaCache" folder. Fixes : - Scraping meta-data for TV series where the folder contained an ".nfo" file didn't support IMDB IDs longer than 7 digits. - Scraping meta-data for TV series where the folder contained an ".nfo" file with an IMDB URL didn't write the IMDB id into the meta-data cache. - The RSS feed media library plugin wont show duplicate entries if the server moves from https:// to https:// links. However, old entries that were already downloaded before this fix may remain as duplicates. - Enabling 'Force the navigation list or thumb view display to full width' caused cosmetic issues in the equalizer fullscreen navigation interface. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15.5 release candidate 4: New : * New settings (Adv. Options / Interface / Playlist) that instruct Zoom Player to scan the media library scraped information for media titles when adding files to the playlist. Please note, this feature is disabled by default as it adds disk access and is not suited for very large playlists. * New settings (Adv. Options / Interface / Playlist) that instruct Zoom Player to scan the media library scraped information for media titles based on the parent folder of the playing media (usually applies to movies) when adding files to the playlist. Please note, this feature is disabled by default as it adds disk access and is not suited for very large playlists. * New entry in the play history's right-click menu to try obtaining titles for the selected entries using meta-data scraped through the media library. * New "fnRestart" function to restart Zoom Player. * New "fnRestartWithParams" function to restart Zoom Player with the same command line parameters it was executed with. Change : + Zoom Player should close much faster when closing the player while a download plugin was refreshing content. + The RSS media library plugin can now display more than 5000 entries, it can now display any number of entries fitting under 10mb of RAM. + Ctrl+"A" now works to select every item in the play history window. Fixes : - The YouTube media library plugins did not save the "Maximum thumbnail- resolution (720p, more bandwidth)" setting. - The control bar's timeline seek preview image is now hidden instantly when closing the control bar. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15.5 release candidate 3: New : * The play history window now includes a last play position column. * The play history window's right-click menu can now be used to remove selected entries. * The play history window now includes the last play time along with the play date. * New setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Mouse / Settings) that allow you to customize the right-click on timeline seek distance. * New setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Mouse / Settings) that controls whether the control bar should hide automatically if the mouse cursor is currently hovering above the control bar (enabled by default). Previously the control bar would never hide if the mouse cursor hovered above it, now you are in control. Change : + The play history window can now be used to select multiple entries. + You can now enter empty (folder based) media library categories in order to perform file operations (copy/paste) instead of Zoom Player displaying a "The Category is Empty" message. Fixes : - Using the internal copy/cut & paste operation on folders did not maintain the folder's date, causing it to be re-scraped and any custom artwork to be ignored. - Using the internal copy/cut & paste operation on folders did not update the media history play cache, causing the last play position to disappear. - The Guard Dog feature was incorrectly activated when exiting sleep mode. - With the "Use Media Title if Available" setting disabled, the media title could still become visible in the main window's title area under some conditions. - Fixed an issue that slowed down loading large playlists when drag & dropping the playlists into Zoom Player. - Fixed an issue where the media library's "refresh" entry could become selected for file operations (copy/paste). - The media library's category editor's "Open Media Library" button did not open the media library with the selected category highlighted if the category was not listed due to a category filter. Now the category filter is reset to ensure the correct category is highlighted. - Updated the user-agent ZP uses when downloading data from web servers as some servers were blocking ZP thinking it was an older browser. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15.1 release candidate 2: New : * The playlist fullscreen navigation interface now displays the path to the currently highlighted playlist entry on the bottom of the screen. Change : + Added support for new YouTube channel URL structures that included '/c/' instead of '/user/' or '/channel'. Fixes : - When using the same media library category name for two different category content types (e.g. TV & Movies), re-opening the media library after playing content from one of the categories could result in the wrong category showing. - A bug in the DVD auto-loading bookmarks code caused bookmarks to be ignored. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15.1 release candidate 1: New : * New "Play position bar Position and Color" settings (Adv. Options / Fullscreen Navigation / Thumb View) allowing you to select where the position bar appears in thumb view mode, the options are: 1. Bottom of thumbnail 2. Top of text area 3. Bottom of text area * New "Show TV series name when scraping TV episodes in JukeBox mode" setting (Adv. Options / Fullscreen Navigation / Settings). * New "Disable automated cache clean-up" setting (Adv. Options / Fullscreen Navigation / Thumb View) that prevents the automated clean-up of the thumbnail cache. While cleaning the cache is a once per week operation, when using a large cache size, it can take up to a minute to clear the cache when using a mechanical HDD drive (on an SSD drive it takes 1-2 seconds). * Double clicking a category in the category editor dialog will now open the category's configuration dialog. Change : + When playing a media file all the way through to the end, it's position will now display as fully played instead of no position at all. This does not affect playback, playing the media file will start at the beginning. + When using the AB-Repeat feature, the on-screen markers now hide after setting the repeat end position, no longer obscuring parts of the video. + Due to a YouTube licensing requirement, OSD messages will no longer appear when playing YouTube content. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15.1 beta 2: New : * When the current position bar is enabled, it is now drawn on movie posters in jukebox mode. Please note, this feature will only work properly if there is only one video file within the movie's folder. If the movie is split across multiple files, the bar's position may show an incorrect value. * When using the correct folder structure for the Movie scraping (folder named for the movie+year and one video file within), the last play position will now appear on the movie's folder thumbnail. Change : + You can now select the thumbnail progress bar size. Fixes : - Fixed a bug that triggered a re-scrape of media information whenever daylight saving was enabled/disabled. - Fixed a bug that prevented maximizing to fullscreen if the "Prevent exiting Fullscreen / Zoom mode" setting was enabled in some cases. - The YouTube plugin now correctly displays the video's publish date after YouTube changed the date format May/2020. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15.1 beta 1: New : * New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Thumb View) that controls whether a progress position bar appears on the bottom of thumbnails instead of the current position time (does not apply to Movie JukeBox mode or folders since theys may be comprised of multiple media files). * New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Thumb View) that controls the percentage of a media you need to see before it is marked with the "seen" overlay (eye icon). * New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface) that controls whether playback should be paused when exiting fullscreen using the ESC key. * The YouTube Media Library plugin now includes an option to set your own YouTube API Key. To get your own key, all you need is a google account and filling in a few forms: https://developers.google.com/youtube/registering_an_application By using your own API key, you can gain analytics insights from google. Change : + In previous version, the seen icon (eye) would show on a media library thumbnail if that media has been played previously. Now the seen icon is only displayed when at least 95% of the media has been seen (you can customize this value). + The media library thumbnail view has been slightly optimized, especially when using Windows Default anti-aliasing. Fixes : - Fixed an issue that caused the wrong track to play when opening a media file from explorer (or other external process) if the option to clear the playlist was not enabled. - Using the Advanced Playlist Control to sort items would not work as intended if two items with the same file name were present in the playlist using different titles. - The OpenSubtitles.org subtitle search plugin did not save non-English characters in the username correctly. - Fixed a rare crash when resizing the media library window in thumbnail view mode. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15 release candidate 3: New : * New "Go" button on the station editor to make search practical without access to a keyboard. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / Audio) to control whether the Equalizer and Pre-Amp controls should process DTS/Dolby audio (and their sub-formats such as DTS-HD, Dolby Atmos, E-EAC, etc). By default, these formats are not processed as they are intended for decoding by an external receiver over S/PDIF or BitStreaming. However if you decode these formats on your PC, disabling this setting will allow the Equalizer and Pre-Amp controls to function. * New setting (Adv. Options / System / Screen Saver & Capture) that controls whether playback should be paused before trying to capture a video frame. Please note that it's possible that some video renderers may not be able to capture a frame if the media is playing. * New setting on the media library YouTube plugin to enable listing live streams. To playback live YouTube streams you must use the IFRAME player or use D3D YouTube Source filter v2 or newer. * New setting on the media library YouTube plugin to use the maximum thumbnail resolution YouTube provides (now disabled by default). In previous versions getting the maximum resolution thumbnail was the default behavior, however there are rare instances where the maximum resolution and extra bandwidth are merited. Additionally, there is a YouTube bug that lists a URL for the maximum resolution thumbnail without the file actually being available, so this change works around this issue. Change : + The GoTo time fullscreen navigation interface has been enhanced to work more intuitively and with less clicking required to reach the desired time. + The Torrents download plugin has been updated to support qBitTorrent API v2, requiring qBitTorrent v4.2 or newer, please upgrade. + You can now drag the meta-data edit window more easily by dragging from anywhere in the windows. + Using the "fnTitleToClipboard" function with no media playing will now try to get the title from the currently highlighted playlist entry. + The "Close Navigator when opening a new file" setting now applies to the streaming fullscreen navigation interface. Previously it would always close the interface regardless of the setting. + Ctrl+"V" now works in the playlist editor's search box. + You can now use the Space character to activate buttons on the skinned confirmation dialog (previously only the Enter key would work). + Opening a streaming URL now closes the fullscreen navigation interface. + Extended the Command & Control API message 1870 to support passing a title along with the URL to stream. + When playing an MP3 with ID3v2 TAGs that contain multiple images, now the first embedded image is displayed instead of the last. + Right clicking a track in the playlist editor will now select the track less than 2 other tracks are currently selected. Fixes : - A major bug that was introduced in v13.5 prevented the Equalizer and Pre-Amp controls from functioning when decoding audio using a filter that outputs the WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE" structure (Which LAV Audio Decoder uses for most audio formats it decodes). - Streaming audio with non-English characters encoded in the stream's meta-data would sometimes display the wrong characters. - Trying to open the last used fullscreen navigation interface did not work if the player was in audio mode. Now the window automatically switches back to media mode and shows the navigation interface. - The "Trash" icon no longer shows up at the bottom of the media library fullscreen navigation mode when Safe Mode is enabled. - Since they were causing playback issues, the Fast Play, Slow Motion, Half Speed Fast-Play, Half Speed Slow Motion and Increase/Decrease Play Rate functions are no longer accessible when playing a live stream with no duration. - Using Shift+Delete to delete the currently selected playlist entries did not work properly if one of the selected entries was the currently playing media. - When Zoom Player was minimized to the taskbar, instructing Zoom Player to switch to fullscreen mode did not work as intended. - Trying to play a URL straight from the windows clipboard will no longer try playing if the clipboard does not actually contain a URL. - Opening the previously open navigation interface did not work when the previous navigation interface was the 'Favorites'. - Going back from the favorites fullscreen navigation interface to the main interface highlighted the playlist icon instead of the favorites icon. - Using the play history fullscreen navigation with safe mode enabled would trigger a crash or cosmetic glitches when trying to access the functions page. - Assigning functions that auto-execute when a secondary screen is attached or detached did not execute under some conditions. - Some functions called from command line using the "/func" or "/exfunc" parameters could have run before Zoom Player finished loading, triggering unexpected behavior. - You can no longer try to erase the "refresh" and "more" (plus) entries in the media library. - The "Scrapers file name blacklist:" label disappeared under "Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Thumb View". - TheMovieDB scraper plugin can now display information on multiple directors of one movie instead of just the first director. - The delete icon was visible in the download manager fullscreen navigation while safe mode was enabled. - The playlist editor's right-click menu's "Add Streaming URL" feature caused a visual glitch where the highlighted playlist entry was not the one actually playing. - Pressing the Enter key on the playlist editor right after running the player would play the first track instead of the last played track. - Under some rare conditions, the play history dialog could show duplicate entries of the same media. - When playing certain live feeds, right-clicking the timeline could wrongfully show a "Seeking 0 seconds" OSD. - Hovering with the mouse cursor over the timeline will no longer show the timeline position or a preview image if the playing media has no duration (e.g. when viewing a jpeg image). - Some UTF8 encoded ".txt" files did not display anything when viewed. - Loading ".wpl" playlists that contain URLs did not load the URL entries correctly. - Using the Advanced Playlist Control's "Move to Bottom" function caused issues if the currently playing media was moved. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15 release candidate 2: New : * New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / Controls) that lets you specify the number of milliseconds Zoom Player should wait after closing a streaming media before resuming operations. Change : + To prevent instability, if Zoom Player's options dialog is open, all API/Keyboard processing (for the main window) are now disabled. Fixes : - Fix for a possible freeze when opening the media library. - The default 16:10 skin was showing a 1px clear line to the right of the movie poster in jukebox mode. - Fixed an issue where pressing next track in a playlist containing an executable file would not stop playing the previous media track after executing the playlist entry, which also caused a cosmetic glitch in the playlist editor. - Furiously Clicking the mouse's right button to open the context menu while a track was loading caused multiple context menus to appear on screen and could even lead to a crash in some cases. - Under some rare conditions, Mouse Gesture actions could trigger without the left mouse button being held down. - Unchecking "Limit 'Hot Corners' to fullscreen mode" caused issues trying to move the player windows in Audio Mode. - Pressing DEL to erase the currently playing media will no longer prompt you to delete to recycle bin if the playing media is a URL. - Stopped the two settings that control automatic switching between Audio and Media mode from working while the player is in fullscreen mode: Auto Switch to Audio Mode when a Media File does not contain a Video Stream Auto Switch to Media Mode when a Media File contains a Video Stream - Deleting the active entry in the playlist editor (orange highlight when using the default onyx skin), did not reset the active entry if that track wasn't currently playing. - Using the "fnPLEditMetaData" function (for example using the command line "/func:fnPLEditMetaData" parameter) several times would cause multiple windows to appear. - The internal screen saver no longer activates if a track is currently in the process of loading or if an error dialog is currently visible. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15 release candidate 1: Change : + Hovering with the mouse cursor over the timeline no longer pops up a "00:00" position hint when playing a live stream with no duration. Fixes : - Rewind, Fast Forward and Slow Motion are now disabled when playing live streams with no duration (these functions were interfering with playback). - Fixed a freeze when using the MPC Audio Renderer combined with the "Show all filters in Stream Selection sub-menu" setting. - The DVD Audio Renderer setting was not being saved due to a bug introduced in the previous beta. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15 beta 10: Change : + Forgot to include the updated TheMovieDB scraper plugin in the previous beta. Fixes : - Rewrote the entire system that handles the currently selected audio device. Previously, if you were to disconnect an audio device (e.g. a BlueTooth headset), Zoom Player would switch to the default audio device, but when the the audio device was reconnected, Zoom Player would continue to use the default device instead of the previously selected device. Now Zoom Player always tries to use the previously selected device and only temporarily switches to the default device if the selected device is not currently available. - Pressing the next-track button with the next tracks being a series of executable files would execute all files at once instead of just the first executable and pausing. - A bug introduced in a recent beta prevented Zoom Player from automatically switching between DVD and Media modes. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15 beta 9: Change : + TheMovieDB scraper plugin will now scrape movies that do not contain a poster image. Fixes : - Using the Advanced Playlist Control to move items to the top or bottom while a media was playing messed up the playlist active item display as well as the ID3/TAG on-screen information. - When the media library displayed a movie with no poster in JukeBox mode, the poster area showed random junk. - Trying to switch to Audio or DVD modes while a media was in the process of loading triggered a crash. - Trying to close the Playlist editor while a track was in the process of loading triggered a crash. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15 beta 8: New : * New Setting "Adv. Options / System" (disabled by default) to allow the Command & Control API to remotely control the PC's mouse cursor. * Zoom Player Command & Control API has been expanded with support for remotely controlling the PC's mouse cursor. For additional security, this capability requires you to enable the new "Allow remote mouse control" setting. Fixes : - Playing a media through the Advanced Playlist Control dialog and then trying to close the dialog before the media finished loading would cause a non-fatal crash. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15 beta 7: New : * Zoom Player Command & Control API has been expanded: 1. New command to open a streaming URL. 2. New command to Get & Set the current playlist sorting order (Ascending/Descending). 3. New command to sort the playlist (by name, size, date, etc). Change : + The Next/Previous frame functions are now ignored when playing audio-only content (there was no real use for it and it caused weird behavior with some decoders). Fixes : - Enabling "Force the navigation list or thumb view display to full width" or "Force the navigation list or thumb view to maximum width" settings would break the visual integrity of the information fullscreen navigation interface (and the Main navigation interface if it was used in list mode). - The Media Library's "Run Application" plug-in did not run applications correctly if some command line parameters were used. - Fixed an issue where certain characters used in a media library's category path could corrupt the category list or prevent the afflicted category from functioning correctly. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15 beta 6: New : + Newly created YouTube media library categories will no longer show a video icon overlay by default (as all content from YouTube is video). + The fullscreen navigation information interface no longer closes automatically when opening a new media file. Fixes : - Enabling fullscreen navigation's "Safe Mode" broke the functions screen on the "Favorites" navigation interface. - Enabling fullscreen navigation's "Safe Mode" prevented access to the stream selection navigation interface. - It's no longer possible to erase files in safe mode from within the media library mini-menu. - Accidentally forgot to include the DSF/DSD smart play profiles with the previous beta. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15 beta 5: New : * New Smart Play profile for the ".DSF" file format. * New Smart Play profile for the "DSD" (Direct Stream Digital) codec. Change : + When safe mode is enabled, instead of completely hiding the main navigation interface's "System" sub-menu, now only the "Exit Zoom Player" entry is hidden. Fixes : - Enabling fullscreen navigation's "Safe Mode" broke the functions screen on the "Favorites" navigation interface. - Enabling fullscreen navigation's "Safe Mode" prevented access to the stream selection navigation interface. --- What's new in Zoom Player v15 beta 4: New : * The Play History fullscreen navigation interface now lists the last play time (not just the date), the last play position and the full path to the currently highlighted entry. * The Favorite media fullscreen navigation interface now shows the full path to the highlighted entry. * New "Close on Play" checkbox on the Advanced Playlist Control dialog to control whether the dialog remains open or closed after playing a new media from the dialog. Change : + Enhanced detection for Dolby Atmos tracks. + Changed the how information (text/icons) are aligned on the right side of fullscreen navigation interfaces so the information does not shift around when the selected line is changed. + Tweaked the list based fullscreen naviation interfaces to squeeze out a little more horizontal space. Fixes : - The sub-folder selection within the media scanner fullscreen navigation interface would draw outside the defined line boundries. - The media scanner no longer allows you to add folders to plugin based categories (which are not folder based). --- What's new in Zoom Player v15 beta 3: New : * Live YouTube stream support using the latest version of the 3DYD YouTube source and LAV Filters. * New YouTube channel listing strategy (not enabled by default) which you can now enable through the Media Library category editor. The new strategy works by listing videos in a channel's "Uploads" playlist. The downside to this strategy is that some videos may not be ordered by Publish date. For this reason, 50 videos are requested instead of the usual 25 and these videos are then sorted by the plugin instead of just listing them as-is. The upside is that you get longer descriptions for the videos. * The media library can now display a format icon for the new AV1, DTS:X and Dolby Atmos audio/video codecs. * Support for the ADTS audio wrapper format. * New "/SHOWOSD:[Text]" command line parameter used to show a pop-up OSD on an already running instance of Zoom Player. Change : + YouTube changed their text encoding scheme which caused Zoom Player to show the encoding of certain characters instead of the actual characters. + Trying to open a navigation interface while in audio mode simply didn't do anything, now Zoom Player will automatically switch to media mode and show the navigation interface. + Trying to seek backward/forward on a live stream with no duration will no longer show an OSD message as if a seek was performed. Fixes : - The "Refresh" button on the media library category configuration dialog was accidentally left enabled for folder based categories. Clicking it would trigger a "list index out of bounds" error. - Manually editing a Zoom Player ".CHP" chapter file using an external text editor could have triggered a freeze when trying to load the associated media file. - Changing the internal screen saver's slideshow path did not take affect until the next player restart if the screen saver was previously active (changing the folder didn't clear the cache). - Streaming audio-only YouTube with visualizations would not always enable the ZP DSP Filter, causing synchronization issues between the audio and visualization. - Trying to close the Install Center during an install could have resulted in a crash. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.6 beta 2: Change : + YouTube changed their text encoding scheme which caused Zoom Player to show the encoding of certain characters instead of the actual characters. + Trying to open a navigation interface while in audio mode simply didn't do anything, now Zoom Player will automatically switch to media mode and show the navigation interface. + Trying to seek backward/forward on a live stream with no duration will no longer show an OSD message as if a seek was performed. Fixes : - Manually editing a Zoom Player ".CHP" chapter file using an external text editor could have triggered a freeze when trying to load the associated media file. - Changing the internal screen saver's slideshow path did not take affect until the next player restart if the screen saver was previously active (changing the folder didn't clear the cache). --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.6 beta 1: Change : + The Media Library category editor has been restructured to make it easier to use when working with many categories. Fixes : - Deleting the currently playing file did not remove the file from the current playlist. - Under some condition, the previously played media title would appear in the timeline area and invalid entries were being added to the play history. - Erasing entries from the favorite media list did not actually save the list your drive. Unless a new entry was added (which did save the list), restarting Zoom Player would restore the erased entries. - Removing entries from the playlist editor did not always select the current remaining track. - The chapter selection pop-up OSD appeared in the wrong screen position. - In the playlist editor, clicking the blank area under the playlist entries would select the last entry without clearing the currently selected entry. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.5 beta 6: New : * Extended video streaming support for the following web sites: Facebook (facebook.com) Vimeo (vimeo.com) Dailymotion (dailymotion.com) VK (vk.com) LiveLeak (liveleak.com) Break.com (break.com) Veoh (veoh.com) eBaum's World (ebaumsworld.com) VKMag.com (vkmag.com) Team Four Star (teamfourstar.com) GodTube (godtube.com) StreetFire.net (streetfire.net) Daily HaHa (dailyhaha.com) TCMag.com (tcmag.com) Bofunk (bofunk.com) Some sites (e.g. facebook) may require you to enable the extended analysis mode for the 3DYD filter through the Zoom Player Install Center. * Automatic fullscreen navigation skin switching based on the display's aspect ratio. For example, by specifying a 16:10 and selected a Zoom Player navigation skin designed for 16:10 displays. (e.g. https://www.inmatrix.com/zplayer/nav/default1610.shtml) Note: Skin switching is currently only triggered when opening a navigation interface. * New "Refresh" option (Media Library Category Editor / Configure Category) for YouTube channels and RSS Streams that refreshes the channel's Name & Thumbnail. Change : + Entering a media library TV JukeBox folder that contains no media files will no longer switch to thumbnail view for the empty folder, instead remaining in file list mode. Fixes : - When viewing the media library's TV/Movie in JukeBox mode, the backdrop images was not scaled and cropped properly on non-16:9 displays (e.g. 1920x1200 monitor) leaving black bars instead of filling with the backdrop. - Zoom Player will no longer try running MediaInfo.dll when playing a URL, removing the 'unknown error' message from the play information dialogs. - Using the "^" character in a file name to cause the media library scraper to ignore any text after this character did not work in some cases. - The "Mute audio during forward and backward seeks" setting was muting audio when attempting to seek forward/backward in a live stream even in cases seeking was not possible. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.5 beta 5: New : * New "Thumb rendering threads" setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Thumb View) to specify the number of CPU threads used to render the thumbview display. Previously, this setting was hard-coded to use 2 threads, but now you can specify any value from "Auto" to "16". Auto mode uses either 2 or 3 threads depending on your PC, but performance can be improved further with additional threads on systems containing many cores or high bandwidth RAM. * New "Support folders as playlist entries" Setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Playlist). This setting was previously hardcoded and is still enabled by default to support advanced playlist functionality. However, supporting folders as playlist entries triggers a spun-down HDD drive to spin back up when a playlist is loaded. With this new setting disabled, you can now prevent drives from accidentally spinning up. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / Controls) to mute the audio when enabling Slow Motion or Fast Play. * New "fnToggleOverlayCover" function to toggle the "Video covers entire display area" setting on and off. Change : + Optimized the Media Library's thumbnail drawing code, increasing update speed and smoothness. + The Maximum number of scraping threads used by the media library has increased from 8 to 16. + When a media library scraped movie did not contain a backdrop image, the default background image is now used instead of a black screen. + Updated the PNG and zLib libraries to newer versions. Fixes : - Starting Zoom Player with the "Do not check if a file exists when adding to the playlist" setting enabled no longer triggers spun-down HDD drives to spin-up. - The GuardDog feature would try to restart Zoom Player if Zoom Player's load time was taking too long (due to HDD drive spin-ups or a network drive reconnection). - The Media Library's Jukebox mode would not enable if the only file in the folder was a playlist. - Fixed a case where a media library scraped movie not containing a backdrop image showed a backdrop from another movie. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.5 beta 4: Fixes : - When the "Force the navigation list or thumb view display to full width" setting was enabled in combination with the "Use dynamically visible scroll bar" setting, the thumbnail would not highlight correctly. - TheAudioDB.com media library scraper can now better handle artist names containing the "-" character, for example "Alt-J - This Is All Yours" will now properly scrape. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.5 beta 3: New : * TheMovieDB.org media library scraping plugin has been enhanced and can now return non-english meta-data (texts and images). Change : + The Install Center now includes two configuration profiles for the 3DYD YouTube Source filter that enable HD/4K streaming. + Visualization are now enabled when the 3DYD YouTube Source filter is set to "audio only" output. Fixes : - TheAudioDB.com scraper plugin is now functional after the API used by the site moved to encrypted communication (https), breaking backward compatibility. - If a media title contained a 'line feed' or 'return' characters, it would corrupt the play history. - Fixed a possible TheMovieDB.org scraper freeze (could have caused slow-downs on exit or more rarely, a player freeze) when used in combination with the "Scrape using media derived title (instead of file name)" category setting. - When the "Scrape using media derived title (instead of file name)" category setting was enabled, under some conditions, the media's thumbnail would not display after closing and reopening the media library. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.5 beta 2: New : * The playlist editor (when using the default Onyx skin or the bundled Alba skin) now draws alternating line highlights making the playlist easier to track visually. * The playlist editor's right-click menu now features Colorize actions that let you easily color-code track(s) text and background colors. The color information is automatically saved and restored when using Zoom Player's default ZPL format playlists. * New "PlayListData/Background2" skin script parameter that specifies the alternating playlist editor line highlight color. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback) that automatically tries to use the YouTube IFRAME player if DirectShow playback of a YouTube stream fails. * The advanced playlist control (accessible through the playlist editor or by pressing "J") now show the number of items remaining in the playlist as the search filters down the list. Change : + The advanced playlist control's filter search was searching the entire playlist on each letter pressed, this caused a sluggish user experience when dealing with very larger playlists (over 30,000 entries). To enhance the user experience, the search action is now only performed 350-400ms after the last key-stroke, ensuring that the user interface does not stall while typing. Fixes : - Using the "Stop" function while a media was loading combined with a non-default setting that closes the playing media when using the "Stop" function and when display a JPEG/PNG image could cause the image to remain on screen. - Double-clicking an entry on the skin selection dialog could sometimes trigger an access violation error. - When opening the playlist editor, under some conditions the bottom entries would not show up until the playlist screen was refreshed by a click or scroll. - The "&" character wasn't showing up in the playlist editor. - Pressing under the last item in the playlist editor did not visually select the last item in the list. Then if you pressed the "Enter" key, it would start playing the last item in the playlist which was a bit confusing without the visual cue of a selected entry. - Fixed a crash when trying to play a video file with too many external audio tracks. External audio tracks are now limited to a maxiumum of 10 tracks. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.5 beta 1: New : * New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / Controls): "Next / Previous Track" plays the next/prev media in the same folder if playlist contains 1 file. This function behind this setting was previously always enabled. This setting remains enabled by default, but from now you can disable this behavior from the advanced options dialog. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Fullscreen Navigation) to force the navigation list or thumb view to maximum width. Unlike the "full width" setting, this setting will make the navigation list area take the display device's maximum resolution, which can cause some cosmetic issues (like the thumbnail highlight getting cropped). Change : + Zoom Player now does a better job at extracting album art images from media files if the JPEG image contains junk in front of the actual image. + The Command & Control API now notifies when subtitles are enabled/ disabled when using the "fnToggleSub" and "fnDisableDVDsub" functions. Fixes : - Kinetic scrolling in the media library did not work well using a mouse cursor, stopping when attempting to scroll multiple times while the kinetic movement was still in mid process. - Playing media that contained certain special characters in the media's title caused multiple unplayable entries to appear in the play history. - With the "Adv. Options / Interface / Position & Size - Auto-Size User Interface to maintain Video Aspect Ratio (when resizing)" setting enabled, playing audio files with folder/album art could cause Zoom Player's main window to display partially off-screen. - The latest version of mediainfo DLL changed how it extracts cover art for audio files, breaking Zoom Player support for displaying the album art with some audio formats (mainly M4A). - Better album art image extraction from audio files with ID3v2 TAGs when the image header included some junk data. - When opening a media file by double-clicking from explorer (or other file managers), the currently playing track wouldn't highlight correctly and show the playing position in the playlist editor. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.4 beta 2: New : * New "Run Application" media library plugin that lets you run applications and scripts directly from a media library category thumbnail. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface), Station manager should stay on top of other application when switching to fullscreen mode. * New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback), Load .URL files as streaming media (otherwise load as web page). Change : + Media library meta-data scraping had issues with long file paths and URLs (over 200 characaters, depending on Zoom Player's installation path) due to an early design decision to make the cached entries easy to identify using their file names and URL addresses. However, to this day, windows does not support paths longer than 255 characters correctly. As a work-around, if a long file name or url is processed, the cache mechanism now uses a short hash instead of the full file name or url. + Enhanced support for RSS feed thumbnails. More thumbnails should show up when adding RSS feeds as media library categories (including more category thumbnail for feeds that support them). + If an RSS Feed has multiple entries with the same publish date, the entries will now be second-level sorted by URL. + When download playlists Zoom Player now uses the windows temp folder instead of the 'my documents'. Fixes : - A race condition caused the scrape manager thread to not signal it is terminating correctly, causing Zoom Player to freeze on exit. - RSS feeds containing a special unicode line-break character in the description would trigger a freeze when opening the RSS media library category a second time. - The "Continue to the next Playlist item when an invalid file is played" setting would skip tracks if the unplayable media was the last playlist entry. - Opening a playlist from the file-open dialog would not always preserve the active playlist entry as specified in the playlist file. - Some unicode characters did not show up correctly in the playlist editor and music OSD if the selected font did not support the characters. Now a different windows text-rendering function is used, one that takes unsupported character from a system-default font. - When including an executable entry in the playlist, playback did not progress to the next track correctly and would cause the wrong title to appear in the playlist editor. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.4 beta 1: Change : + Two Sonique visualization resolution settings have changed from an aspect ratio of 4:3 to 16:9 : 320x240 -> 320x180 640x480 -> 640x360 This change may not be reflected in the drop-down list if you are not using an updated language pack, but this is just cosmetic, the new resolutions are set according to the numbers above. + Enhanced the SHOUTcast station sorting. + The number of RSS entries cached by the media library plugin has been raised from 2000 to 5000. Fixes : - Enabling the "Share Play History at a custom path" setting and not specifying a trailing "\" in the folder name would cause the play history to be saved incorrectly. - The media library playlist plugin now supports playlist URLs longer than 255 characters long. - Playing an audio file with visualization could cause the right click menu to show multiple "close navigator" entries when right-clicking on a fullscreen navigation interface. - The SHOUTcast station browser would show duplicate entries after opening the dialog multiple times on different days. - Opening a streaming URL from clipboard (Alt+Ctrl+"U") failed to work if the URL was a playlist. - Pressing the "Play (add to playlist)" button while a navigation interface was visible and the "Stop closes the navigation interfaces" setting was enabled prevented playback of the station from starting. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.2 beta 4: Change : + You can now set the "Retain Media Playback History for" value to 99999 days (~2738 years), up from the original 9999 days (~27 years), just in case one of you finds immortality and wished to use Zoom Player forever. Fixes : - Opening a playlist from navigation interfaces loaded the playlist but did not automatically start playing it. - The fullscreen navigation's text Anti-Aliasing setting was being reset after restarting the player. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.2 beta 3: New : * With LAV Filters v0.71, a D3D11 hardware decoding mode has been added. You can instruct LAV to use this mode automatically by setting the option under "Adv. Options / Playback / Video". Change : + The "Play History database may be corrupted" message will no longer appear unless the play history file is actually corrupted. Fixes : - Fixed a bug that prevented the previously active audio track from being restored when re-playing a video with multiple audio tracks. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.2 beta 2: New : * New "Favorites" fullscreen navigation interface. Any media can be added to the favorites list through the media library or file browsing navigational interfaces. Please note that this change required resetting the "Navigation interfaces on main navigator" feature to it's default value (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation). * When using the "Open URL" function, a new "Clear playlist" checkbox is now available (previously the playlist was always cleared). Change : + The torrents plugin should now shutdown a little faster if Zoom Player closes while the plugin was fetching an updated file list. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.1 release candidate 3: Fixes : - Opening the media library, especially on 4K displays showed a low resolution image of the media library for a split second before displaying the full resolution version. The double-draw event caused both the described visual glitch as well as a performance penality. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.1 release candidate 2: New : * New setting (Adv. Options / Playback / Audio / Visualizations) to enable Zoom Player's DSP filter only for visualizations. * New setting (Adv. Options / Playback / Audio / Visualizations) to set an initial audio re-synchronization value for visualizations (Zoom Player's DSP filter is required for this setting to function). Change : + Media Library plugin result entries now display the media's title instead of the file name or URL in list mode (previously the title only showed in thumbnail mode). Fixes : - Fixed a bug introduced in a previous beta that caused a mess when trying to move items in the playlist. - Scrolling down in the download tracking fullscreen navigation interface then exiting and re-opening the interface caused an empty list to show instead of the previous list. - The media library's playlist plugin no longer shows an invalid duration value if the playlist entry has no duration. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.1 release candidate 1: New : * New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / File Tracker) to specify the download tracking plugins refresh rate. This value only affects the media library and file browsing navigation interfaces, the download tracking navigation interface refreshes at a higher rate automatically. Please note that using a low number (under 10 seconds) may impact performance when tracking large file lists (over 10,000 entries). Change : + Windows 10 creators edition changed how fonts are rendered by enabling clear-type rendering at higher resolutions. Clear-type is a lot slower to draw and at resolutions above 1080p causes severe performance degradation in Zoom Player's fullscreen navigation interfaces. Previously, to solve this issue, you could set Zoom Player to override windows' font rendering. From this version, the setting is enabled by default (you can still change it manually under "Adv. Options / System"). + Further optimized the download plugin code to the point where a data refresh on the download navigation interface should no longer cause any UI lag whatsoever. Fixes : - Fixed a crash when playing a live video stream using MadVR as the video renderer and trying to use the pause button on the control bar. --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.1 beta 3: New : * Automatic support for native Windows 7-10 media library folder structure (previously only the more basic Windows XP-Vista library structure was supported). Change : + Zoom Player's default window size for the onyx skin was changed to present a default video size of 960x540 (up from the previous 604x340) and for the alba skin, the default video size was changed to 1280x720. + You can now press any navigation key to cancel a 'play all files in folder' feature mid-action. Fixes : - Fixed a possible crash that would trigger sometimes on an initial run after a fresh install. - A function optimized in beta 2 had a bug which caused the visualization plugin list to reset (no plugins listed). --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.1 beta 2: New : * New setting (Adv. Options / File Format Association / File Extensions" to instruct Zoom Player to process ".m3u8" playlists. This setting is disabled by default as it can cause conflicts with services that require DirectShow filters to process this type of playlist format. * New setting on the Torrents download & tracking plugin to prevent it from passing file entries to Zoom Player that do not actually exist on the disk drive. This setting is off by default but can increase performance when dealing with a large number of torrents that were only partially downloaded. * The last play position is now drawn over the thumbnail in TV Jukebox mode. Change : + The download plugins synchronization has been completely rewritten, and should no longer cause any user interface slow-downs. + The torrents plugin has been greatly optimized, working much faster with large file lists. + The download fullscreen navigation interface should scroll much smoothly when dealing with a large number of files. + The YouTube (Channel/Search/Trending), Playlist and RSS Feed media library plugins have been optimized for greater performance. + Optimized core string handling routines, improving script parsing (e.g. Skin parsing) and other areas. + A 'processing, please hold ...' message now appear when it takes Zoom Player longer to close due to background tasks (media scraping, download plugin sync) still being active. Fixes : - The currently selected playlist editor entries would lose their selection if a playlist update was triggered after the listed media's duration has been scraped. - Trying to play a streaming media URL that contained trailing spaces would fail. Trailing spaces are now trimmed (you can still use encoded space characters in the URL). --- What's new in Zoom Player v14.1 beta 1: Change : + You can now press the escape key to cancel a 'play all files in folder' feature mid-action. Accidentally playing an entire drive could have caused Zoom Player to appear unresponsive. + Switching between fullscreen and windowed mode while the media library is opened should be cleaner and faster (less visual junk in the transition). Fixes : - Fixed a scraping bug where the ".nfo" file detection algorithm would fail with files/folders names containing unicode characters. - Opening the file browsing and download manager fullscreen navigation interfaces will no longer freeze for two seconds if the Torrents download plugin is enabled and qBittorrent isn't running. - Opening the file browsing and download manager fullscreen navigation interfaces will no longer freeze for long periods if qBittorrent is seeding many torrents. - The media library should no longer freeze for a few seconds when retrieving large file lists from qBittorrent using the Torrents plugin. - The information dialog ("I" keyboard macro) did not show up when playing in fullscreen on a secondary monitor. - The torrents download plugin was not recognizing a file's download priority correctly after the latest qBittorrent release. - The torrents download plugin was listing files returned by qBittorrent but no longer existing on the disk drive in the root folder instead of their (no longer existing) path. - The Lock-UI (user interface) feature used to prevent accidental clicks did not block some click and double-click actions. - The Dolby Digital Plus audio format was not being displayed with an icon on the TV and Movie jukebox screens. - The play position tool-tip was sometimes displayed in the wrong screen position on multi-monitor displays. - MIDI audio playback should be more reliable. --- * The Complete Change list history can be found on-line at: https://www.inmatrix.com/files/zoomplayer_whatsnew_archive.shtml --- End.