Zoom Player MAX is a powerful and full-featured media player that allows you to turn your computer into a home entertainment center within a moment. This tool supports playing not only video and audio files but also online radio stations, and also browses through image files. Despite the great number of helpful features this program includes, it's really intuitive and ease to use .
Although Windows operating system includes its own media player (Windows Media Player), it usually lacks some video and audio codecs; and the player thus isn't capable of playing all kinds of media files natively. Besides, the features set may happen to be inadequate for many users. Zoom Player MAX overtakes both issues as it supports playing a really large number of SD video, HD video and audio formats, and it also comes packed with a lot of useful features like an audio equalizer, a color control, a media library, an online radio station browser, a file browser, a download manager, a media scanner, a chapter editor and many others. The program also lets you create file associations, so you can set it as the default player for all the media file types you would like to.
Zoom Player MAX can be installed and upgraded through the utility called "Install Center" which allows you to select the codecs and optional components you want to install or upgrade in your system, as well as the language packs you want to install for the program's interface. This utility automatically detects the components and codecs that are missing or outdated in your system and suggests downloading them, so it helps you keep the program up-to-date too.
Finally, as I stated before, this media player has been designed with a special focus on simplicity. You can access its most common features and controls using the arrows and the Enter key, which is especially useful when you are playing a media file in full-screen mode. The developers call this feature the "Five-Key system".
All in all, Zoom Player MAX is a very advisable media player that is worth trying thanks to its multiple features and supported codecs and formats. The player also comes with an affordable price tag.
v14.5.1450 [Jan 21, 2019]
- Extended video streaming support for more web sites.
- Automatic fullscreen navigation skin switching based on the display's aspect ratio.
- TheMovieDB.org media library scraping plugin has been enhanced and can now return non-english meta-data (texts and images).
- 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.
- New "PlayListData/Background2" skin script parameter that specifies the alternating playlist editor line highlight color.
- 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.
- New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback) that automatically tries to use the YouTube IFRAME player if DirectShow playback of a YouTube stream fails.
- New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / Controls).
- New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / Controls) to mute the audio when enabling Slow Motion or Fast Play.
- New Setting (Adv. Options / Fullscreen Navigation / Customization) to force the navigation list or thumb view to maximum width.
- 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.
- The advanced playlist control (accessible through the playlist editor or by pressing "J") now shows the number of items remaining in the playlist as the search filters the playlist.
- New "Refresh" option (Media Library Category Editor / Configure Category) for YouTube channels and RSS Streams that refreshes the channel's Name & Thumbnail.
- New "exVidMoveHorz" and "exVidMoveVert" extended functions that move the video area (fullscreen) or player window (when not in fullscreen) horizontally and vertically.
- New "fnToggleOverlayCover" function to toggle the "Video covers entire display area" setting on and off.
- 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.
- 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).
- When a media library scraped movie did not contain a backdrop image, the default background image is now used instead of a black screen.
- 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 Install Center now includes two configuration profiles for the 3DYD YouTube Source filter that enable HD/4K streaming.
- Visualization are now supported when the 3DYD YouTube Source filter is set to "audio only" output.
- The Command & Control API now notifies when subtitles are enabled/disabled when using the "fnToggleSub" and "fnDisableDVDsub" functions.
- Updated the PNG and zLib libraries to newer versions.
- TheAudioDB.com scraper plugin is now functional again after the API used by the site moved to encrypted communication (https), breaking backward compatibility.
- 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.
- 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 tried 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), from now the guard dog feature will only start functioning once Zoom Player has finished loading.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The Media Library's Jukebox mode would not enable if the only file in the folder was a playlist.
