Announcing Zoom Player v8.2.0 Preview 1

[Blight]

I'm happy to announce Zoom Player v8.2.0 preview 1!

The Default Skin has been modernized & polished.
The buttons have been redesigned for additional clarity.
Button order has shifted on both the playlist and the control bar interfaces to improve usability.
The playlist scroll widget scrolls much more smoothly.

The install center has been expanded to add support for direct language pack downloads.

The Windows 7+ window thumbnail preview provides new functions (Mute/Previous Track/Play&Pause/Next Track).

Performance improvements in play history caching and skin parsing.

Bug Fixes and more...

Click to visit the Download Area

Complete change list from v8.1.6:

 New :

  * The Onyx (default) skin has undergone a modernization process,
    making the icons clearer, sharper and everything a little more
    intuitive.

  * Under Windows 7 (or newer), the Taskbar thumbnail, which appears
    when hovering with the mouse cursor over the Zoom Player task bar
    button now features 4 functions:
    1. Mute
    2. Previous Chapter/Track
    3. Play / Pause
    4. Next Chapter/Track

  * The Install center can now install language packs.

  * The Install Center now remembers the 'Silent Installer' and
    'Automatic Configuration' checkbox values after restarting.

  * The Play History cache (used to store last media position and
    display the play history) has been rewritten from scratch,
    performance has been greatly improved.

  * New "Very Long Seek" Backward and Forward functions using the
    Ctrl+Shift+"," and Ctrl+Shift+"." keyboard macros.

    By default the seek action is 10 minutes.  This value is adjustable
    through the Advanced Options dialog under the [Playback / Controls]
    sub-menu.

  * The Playlist editor's scroll bar background is now skinnable.
    For more information, visit the skinning tutorial:
    http://inmatrix.com/zplayer/highlights/skintutorial.shtml
  
  * The Playlist editor's search-box font and background are now skinnable.
    For more information, visit the skinning tutorial:
    http://inmatrix.com/zplayer/highlights/skintutorial.shtml

  * The Playlist editor's scroll bar widget is now skinnable with an
    Alpha (translucency) bitmap, as used by the modernized default onyx skin.



 Changes :

  + The Playlist editor's scroll widget now moves smoothly.

  + Version display is now more consistent with web (8.1.x vs. 8.1x).
    API version structure remains the same for backward compatibility.

  + The keyboard editor no longer shows scan code character value for
    MultiMedia keys (since multimedia keys are not mapped to characters).

  + A few optimizations to the skin parsing code.

  + With the new Play History caching optimizations, the Advanced Options
    [Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Settings - Highlight previously
    viewed files] is now fast enough to work with large directories on
    modern hardware.



 Fixes :

  - Fixed a bug introduced in v8.1.5 that listed all file sizes as "0 bytes"
    in the play history.

  - When maximizing the player window and then minimizing the player window
    to the taskbar, the maximized window state and the previous window
    size were lost.

  - The "Fix window movement glitches" setting that was used to work-around
    a window glitch that caused the player window to jump when trying to
    move the player window by clicking on the video area is now disabled
    by default (even for users who previously had this feature enabled).
    
    An alternative fix is now in place that should hopefully resolve the
    jumping window issue without having to enable this setting.

  - The Options dialog search function results prevented certain buttons
    from being accessible while the search results were visible.

  - The Options dialog search function now supports unicode text.
  
  - The options dialog's Help button's context menu now supports
    unicode text.
   
  - A Zoom Player tab would briefly appear on the desktop when running
    Zoom Player with a windows shell other than 'explorer.exe'.
    
  - The #1601 API message returning the number of audio tracks for the
    playing media returned the wrong number at times.  
    
  - Under certain conditions, the 'filter properties' sub-menu would
    list filters with a '#2' suffix even though there was only one
    instance of the filter in the graph.