Announcing Zoom Player v3.30 beta 2

[Blight]

This marks the second simplification stage for Zoom Player. In this stage, I introduced full translation capabilities into the player. The translation is based on unicode, so Windows 2000/2003/XP or newer is highly recommended.

Beside the new multilingual capabilities, there are quite a bit of fixes, features and modifications, so read the list below.

This beta can also be considered a release candidate, if there are no issues coming up, I'm going to be releasing v3.30 final as soon as possible so more users will get exposed to the simpler interfaces.

Changes since v3.30 beta 1:

* Customized Media Entries are now split into two files. One for
the actual entry in use and another for available profiles.
This should help you keep the current Custom Media Playback
settings when upgrading. If you do manual installation, just
make sure to only copy the "*.profiles" over from the
"MediaAutoGraph" directory.

* New Settings (Options / DVD / AutoAR) allowing you to set
default Video Position, Blanking and Aspect Ratio presets
when a DVD Starts.

* New Setting (Options / Settings / Interface) allowing you to
show the Zoom Player version within the FileName area of the
user interface when nothing is playing.

* New Setting (Options / Values / Interface) that slows down the
Zoom Player internal screen saver so that it won't hog the CPU.

* New Settings (Options / Filter Control / Settings) that makes
Zoom Player check if the file size changed when playback ends
and if it does, reload the file at the last position. This
is useful if you are streaming a file and it keeps growing as
you watch it.
This feature is limited to the professional version.

* New Toggle Entry (Options / Settings / Mouse Toggles) allowing
the middle mouse button to pop the Mouse Wheel Navigator. This
makes selection of a mouse wheel function a breath.

* You can now use filters with no output pins within the
Customized Media Audio/Video Decoder Profiles (such as
renderer filters). Doing so will automatically force
Zoom Player to ignore any specified rendering filter.

* Created a few Customized Media profiles for the new ffdshow
Audio Decoder filter. This filter can't play DVD AC3 quite yet,
but it can decode AC3 in media files along with MPEG1/2 Audio and
MPEG Layer 3 audio (MP3). It also has a few interesting DSP
features. Not sure if they are all active though.

* Created a Customized Media Profile for the Sorenson Video 3 video
format. This is the format used by nearly all the QuickTime
trailers! You need a recent version of ffdshow for this to play
(I used the ffdshow-20021029.exe version). Between this decoder
and the 3ivx QuickTime parser, you can play quite a bit of
QuickTime content without having to resort to using the somewhat
unpredictable (and CPU hoggish) QuickTime ActiveX component
(Which you can disable under "Options/Filter Control/Settings".

* You can now Customize the Play List right-click Context Menu.

* DVD Forced/Commentary subtitle tracks are now identified as such.

* DVD Audio Tracks with Commentary are identified and the khz and
bit value of each track is displayed.

* Some new icons on the options dialog.

+ The Customized Additional DVD Filters can now be ordered so the
connection order in the graph can be determined. You can also
load multiple instances of the same filter.

+ I have restored the Filter File (filename.filters) functionality.
This feature has a very specific usage which is not required
under normal circumstances and as such I put a few warning
messages when using this feature.

+ The mouse wheel can now be used for seeking when over the time
line on the main user interface and not only on the control bar.

+ A few small tweaks to the media mode context menu.

- Pressing Insert or Delete on the Media Library Navigator will
no longer throw an "List Index Out of Bounds" error.

- Changing the priority on the Basic Options Dialog didn't work.

- You could not access all of the Resize Navigator functionality
using the mouse.

- Using the Eject function will now only close currently playing
Media File/DVD if it is being played from the ejected drive.

- When the Search box on the Play List Editor was disabled, you
couldn't use the mouse to highlight the bottom items on the list.

- Switching skins should no longer disrupt the maximized window state.

- Erasing files using the file navigators should now refresh the list
when reopening the navigator.

- Folder images now work properly in unicode subdirectories.

- ID3 display with non-english characters should now work.

- Exporting Girder file and selecting Cancel will no longer export
the file anyhow.


Download Zoom Player v3.30 beta 2 here (http://www.inmatrix.com/files/zoomplayer_beta.shtml).

Language files can be downloaded here (http://www.inmatrix.com/files/zoomplayer_language.shtml).

[bond]

hi blight

i played around with the aspect ratio feature in zp and found out that it only seems to work right with video streams that havent got the black borders cropped off (but still have the dvd par)

as most people crop off the borders when encoding perhaps the following small changes could be done to zoomplayer to make it resize properly every (!) file:

lets say i have a pal (720x576) dvd source (ntsc would always be 720x480)
normally i would crop and encode it to 640x256 (non-anamorphic) but i want to use zps aspect ratio feature and encode it as anamorphic 448x256 (with the same par as the dvd but cropped)

to calculate the correct resize ratio for a cropped image is easy:

for pal:

we know the not cropped image always has the following ar:
720/576 = 1.25 | always in pal 25fps

to calculate how big the height would have been if i didnt had cropped, we know the following:
input_width/not_cropped_height = 1.25

which means in our case:
not_cropped_height = 448/1.25 = 358.4

so in our case the not cropped picture would have been
448x358.4

if you now use this height value for the resize process (and not "256" of the cropped file) you will get the right aspect ratio with your ar feature for every file and not only for the not_cropped ones!
this calculation also of course doesnt hurt if someone tries to play a not_cropped one (ie 720x576 => as 720/1.25 = 576 again)

would be great if you could add this small calculation to zoomplayer's aspect ratio feature

excuse if it is totally crap what i am writing here ;)

[Blight]

There is no AR flag, so ZP can't guess what is right. With Matroska you can set the "True AR". And then ZP will compensate (set to Derived Mode).

[bond]

the ar is stored in the mpeg-4 bitstream for example

but what i wrote isnt related to any ar indication stored in the file:
its just a possibility on howto calculate the size of a cropped picture but with black borders, to be able to resize automatically to the right size with the 16:9 option

[Stux]

Bond, what you are describing is actually PAR

Pixel Aspect Ratio, and yes, it is a far superior method for describing the aspect ratio than DAR (Display Aspect Ratio)

Basically, by way of example, DVDs have precisely 4 different PARs

the PAR used for :
NTSC 4:3
PAL 4:3
NTSC 16:9
PAL 16:9

As long as the PAR is known/stored then the aspect ratio can be preserved no matter what crops are used. This is the reason why PAR is more powerful than DAR, because a DAR of 4:3 would assume that no cropping had been performed, but a PAR makes no assumption.

So, once you know the PAR then cropping is simple.

Now, the 3ivx MP4 filters translate the MPEG-4 PAR into a DirectShow style DAR for the use of the host application. Basically AspectRatioX/Y (I believe those are the names) in the VIDEOINFOHEADER2 contains the correct Aspect Ratio in the Microsoft sense (ie (4,3), (16,9), (640,480)

[bond]

yep, its just that the ar options in as good as all players resize according to the input resolution, meaning that for example zps 16:9 option is useless atm with any cropped input

with my calculation the 16:9 option could indirectly "add" the borders again to the cropped image and only than resize with this new resolution according to 16:9
this would make the 16:9 option also usefull with cropped streams independantly of the used dshow filters

this will work with any video stream (not matter if the ar is stored in the file or not), its just that the player checks the input res, checks if it is pal or ntsc and than calculates what size the image would have if it hadnt been cropped...

[Blight]

Bond:
There is no way to know what the source material was.

[bond]

you know the following:
1) the input resolution
2) the frame rate (which means you know if it is pal or ntsc)

you dont need more to calculate what size the cropped image has with black borders...
and if you know that size you can also use zps 16:9 option with cropped material

[Blight]

None of these encodes have proper AR, some come close, but none are 100%, quite a few are not encoded even too closely. Frame rate isn't even perfect either... at best this would be a guesstimate and worst it would be buggy as hell.

[bond]

Originally posted by Blight
None of these encodes have proper AR, some come closewell if they dont have a proper ar, nobody can expect a proper resizing anyways

quite a few are not encoded even too closely.well in that case the user cant expect to get the 16:9 feature to work anyways

Frame rate isn't even perfect either... at best this would be a guesstimate and worst it would be buggy as hell.hm ok

i will stop bugging you with my ideas now :p

[nate klefsas]

I've got a question, now I know apsolutely nothing about dar/par, but I do know in my opinion what a good movie looks like and can tell when a movie isint in proper resolution. I've had sporatic problems. some movies I make will play in the resolution I set them as in media player and others wont. But the one that wont, will always play correctly when I select custom aspect ratio in zoomplayer. Is their something I can do so that it will play correctly in media player to make its settings read like zoomplayers custom aspectratio. Do you think it might be something I'm doing? I wanna know cause I have xbmp and I want my movies to play correctly in it since it is like media player and they play incorrectly in it too. can you give me the low down on what is different between the program that will give me these results?

[Blight]

You encoded the movie incorrectly... You'll have to re-encode it if you want it to play with such an AR control outside of ZP.

[nate klefsas]

what do yu think I did wrong?are you saying I should just change my resolution to a smaller one with the slider bar? I just did the same movie with auto gk and it still does it. I think you said something about an ar flag somewhere above, could that come into play? it just seems like mediaplayer is reading the video I made wrong and zoomplayer reads it right. do you know if their is a player like zoomplayer for xbox? you should make one, that is if its not to much work

[Blight]

I don't own an XBox and I think the xbox hardware is a bit limiting to make it work well...

ZP just forces the AR, I don't know if the xbox player can do that. But you shouldn't need to force the AR unless you encoded badly. As to what you did to encode it badly, I couldn't tell really...

[nate klefsas]

thanks for the help