Best player to change brightness on the fly?

[movmasty]

...and button on the main panel, not in menu....

[filewalker]

In Zoomplayer you just need to press "Shift + 0" (you can also change the keys with the new integrated key editor,allowing you to assign Zoom Player functions to any key) or right click at video area (through context menue) to adjsut colour controls

Cu

[movmasty]

thanks, but when installed in the past i didt feel confortsble with zoom...

[therealjoeblow]

If you want to set up a HTPC to output to a TV, with simple, intuitive and functional controls, the best combination of hardware and software I've found is:

1) ZoomPlayer

2) ATI Remote Wonder
-> http://www.ati.com/products/remotewonder/
or
-> http://www.ati.com/products/remotewonder2/

3)Rylos ZP Plugin for Remote Wonder
-> http://remotew.free.fr/plugins.htm

I actually have both - the Remote Wonder (original) and the RW2, they both came packaged with my All-In-Wonder Radeon 9000 and 9600 cards respectively - the software/driver and basic functionality is exactly the same, but the RW2 has a much nicer look and feel to it, and the mouse emulator works a little better, but as I said functionally they're exactly the same.

I can understand your comment that you "weren't comfortable with ZP", it is daunting at first simply because it has *way* too many options and features for novices, but therein lies it's power. With a maximum of an hour or so of time dedicated to reading the help files and understanding the settings, you can set this up to be so prefectly suited to your needs you'd swear you went down to the panasonic or pioneer factory and had them custom design you a stand-alone player exactly the way you wanted it to be. But with the added flexibility that you can change it however you want in the future.

The default key assignments with the Rylos Plugin and the Remote Wonder maps all frequently used commands intuitively to the remote's buttons, including immediate access to:

-Color Control interface
-Playlist Navigator
-Goto Navigator (time jumping to a specific time index)
-File Open Navigator
-Aspect Ratio Toggles
-Skip/Seek/Jump with remote's arrow keys
-10 zoom presets (great for expanding 2.35:1 widescreens to more like 1.78:1 which is still wide enough but easier to view)
-plus the basics (pause, play, volume, chapter skip, etc)

Plus the ATI remote software lets you program additional buttons as you wish - I have one button set to toggle a hot-key display preset to turn on monitor only, and another to switch to TV out only, so switching the HTPC 'ON' is an extremely simple operation.

For the visual interface, I started with someone's ZP skin called Visibility 2.0 by Baruz (which was custom designed for to be easy to read with TV out) and customized it myself using PaintShop Pro, adding a few new icons for features I wanted. You can get the original version (actually updated now to v-3.1, so you may not need to tweak it yourself) from:

-> http://www.skinbase.org/section.php?sections=zoomplayer


This system comes as close as you can to approximating a stand-alone player. My 5 year old daughter uses it with the same ease as the vcr.

Adjusting the color/brightness/contrast/gama is as simple as a couple of RemoteWonder clicks (it's actually much easier on ZP+RW+Rylos than it is on the TV itself).

Try ZP again, and invest some time in reading the documentation - I'm sure you'll be glad you did in the end.