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Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Zoom Player - the all-in-one media player!
« on: July 21, 2006, 08:34 AM »
I don't usually do this, but since we'll be giving away some licenses, I figured I should clear a few things up...
The problem with the "perfect" media player, is that there are a lot of opinion on what makes a good player.
There is also a certain amount of legal issues involved. For example, MPC/VLC/MPlayer/KMPlayer are shipped with decoders that violate patent law. They aren't being sued as money has not been made.
We are always striving to make Zoom Player "just work". It's a bit more difficult due to the decoder issues, but especially in the upcoming version 5, we're taking multiple steps in improving simplicity and system-integration (auto-scan & detect of good decoder configurations).
The main focus in v5 is to improve the user interface elements, but we also rewrote large portions of the back-end so that adding support for meta-data would become much easier in the next version. You can already see the improvement with the new fullscreen navigation interfaces and in the next beta (not preview) we will show a completely rewritten options dialog which should be much more streamlined and logical.
The main focus for v5.10 (or maybe v6.0, depending on the amount of changes from v5) will be meta-data organization, which should help you tag, sort & manage your media files with greater ease (Zoom Player already contains a media library interface, play history and several other tools, these will get expanded to support more meta-data information).
In closing, the best thing you can do is "get heard". If you want things changed, you must log in to the Zoom Player forum and get yourself heard. Every post is read and most are answered by me personally (not every day, but I do try to read & answer every post, even if it's with a "no").
Every feature request is considered, there are several measures that we consider before implementing new features, but we do consider every request. Quite a lot of Zoom Player's features are user-initiated.
Lastly, I would like to note that the visual glitch in the review is due to something NVIDIA changed in their 9x.xx series of drivers. We're still working on tracking it down, but it something that doesn't effect ATI cards (as far as we can tell so far) or NVIDIA drivers v8x.xx or older. The Global Hotkey support is a new feature (introduced in the latest preview) and is still being improved. And settings not saving is due to the executable being corrupt on Josh's machine.
The problem with the "perfect" media player, is that there are a lot of opinion on what makes a good player.
There is also a certain amount of legal issues involved. For example, MPC/VLC/MPlayer/KMPlayer are shipped with decoders that violate patent law. They aren't being sued as money has not been made.
We are always striving to make Zoom Player "just work". It's a bit more difficult due to the decoder issues, but especially in the upcoming version 5, we're taking multiple steps in improving simplicity and system-integration (auto-scan & detect of good decoder configurations).
The main focus in v5 is to improve the user interface elements, but we also rewrote large portions of the back-end so that adding support for meta-data would become much easier in the next version. You can already see the improvement with the new fullscreen navigation interfaces and in the next beta (not preview) we will show a completely rewritten options dialog which should be much more streamlined and logical.
The main focus for v5.10 (or maybe v6.0, depending on the amount of changes from v5) will be meta-data organization, which should help you tag, sort & manage your media files with greater ease (Zoom Player already contains a media library interface, play history and several other tools, these will get expanded to support more meta-data information).
In closing, the best thing you can do is "get heard". If you want things changed, you must log in to the Zoom Player forum and get yourself heard. Every post is read and most are answered by me personally (not every day, but I do try to read & answer every post, even if it's with a "no").
Every feature request is considered, there are several measures that we consider before implementing new features, but we do consider every request. Quite a lot of Zoom Player's features are user-initiated.
Lastly, I would like to note that the visual glitch in the review is due to something NVIDIA changed in their 9x.xx series of drivers. We're still working on tracking it down, but it something that doesn't effect ATI cards (as far as we can tell so far) or NVIDIA drivers v8x.xx or older. The Global Hotkey support is a new feature (introduced in the latest preview) and is still being improved. And settings not saving is due to the executable being corrupt on Josh's machine.