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I dont think this applies to just anti-virus products. It applies to any software. I mean, Windows has so many holes found because it is the most used OS. I guarantee, if macosx were the most used, it would have just as bad a name as windows does now. Dont get me wrong, the engines for these a/v's are good, they are just bypassed because its the majority marketshare holder.

Youtube has both this video and their human pong one. Check it out

http://www.zdnet.com.au/blogs/securifythis/soa/Why_popular_antivirus_apps_do_not_work_/0,39033341,39264249,00.htm

Antivirus applications from Symantec, McAfee or Trend Micro -- the three leading AV vendors in 2005 -- are far less likely to detect new viruses and Trojans than the least popular brands.

This has nothing to do with the quality of the software or how long it takes the respective firms to update their clients with signatures and other malware countermeasures.

AV companies continue to refine their products and most will tell you they stopped relying on purely signature-based systems many years ago. These days they use all sorts of clever methods to try and detect suspicious behaviour but the problem is that malware authors are also very clever. Very, very clever.

More at source

Blight, let me welcome you to the forum and again, thank you for your donations to the site. I appreciate your posting here and would like to say I do agree with you on what makes a piece of software "perfect" and it being relative to the users need.

In my opinion, I consider ZP to be the best for the sheer fact that it works and it does what it does well.

Also, in regards to the saving bug, yes, there was a problem on my pc. I have been losing settings for various apps due to a registry issue (powerarchiver, putty, ps tray factory are a few of the programs affected). But it has been resolved and that is no longer an issue.

I also intended to post that nvidia's drivers were responsible, however i guess i forgot to.

Anyways, good to see you here and thanks again for making such a versatile player!

ok, they can end the show now, those guys are the winners. I have never seen anything like that before. The ending was absolutely amazing with him throwing the confetti looking stuff on top of her. WOW!

I will do a few! I already have a perfect idea for the first one. The idea I have for my first and second story is this, FIRST: The origin of the cody SECOND: Cody discovers IRC.

I will write up a small script this weekend and post an idea of what I had in mind.

How do you change the screen location?

www.codygonewild.com!

How in the heck can you forget Coding and Snacks for things we love?

this could easily be accomplished with the runas command built in to windows 2000 and xp.

http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml  In my opinion, the best startup management tool

Perhaps for the media portion they mean they can use QoS to allocate more bandwidth to streaming media. Increasing process priority on the player wont do this for you.

That is great bro, I love it!

WinAMP is indeed a great audio player, but, I have found that I can get just as much enjoyment/capability (if not more) with ZP. Have you tried it for audio? I think you will be surprised with how much you can do with this when it comes to all formats.

Actually, here is what worked for me

Go to options

choose Filter control on the left

Under the first tab, Select "VRM9 Windowless (Requires DirectX 9)"

Click the select button underneath those listings

Choose a video renderer like Intervideo's windvd, or powerdvd, or whatever dvd video rendered you have. This will save the screenshots upon unloading of the wmv.

Try whats suggested here

http://forum.inmatrix.com/index.php?showtopic=640

What type of file are you playing?

Also, use ALT+F to do a screen capture of the current video or window in ZP.

Yeah, winamp was great for audio, but video just seemed tacked on and didnt work very well which is why I had to drop it :-/

[APP NAME:]

APP NAME:                    Zoom Player Professional
APP URL:                       http://www.inmatrix.com
APP Version Reviewed:     5.00 Preview 7



Intro:

For the past few years, I have been a long time and devoted winamp user. But as of lately, winamp development has ground to a halt. Due to numerous bugs, like fast forwarding an avi file causing the player to freeze, I have begun the hunt for a new media player. Winamp was beautiful in that it could handle everything I threw at it with the exception of DVD playback.

Enter Zoom Player. Upon discovering this program, I was skeptical that any program could hold up to the torture I put my player through. However, I was soon to find out that I would be pleasantly surprised. Zoom player not only handled every format via a plugin (so you can customize it to your liking) I threw at it (RM, RAM, RV, QT, AVI, MPEG, Any audio format, AND DVD PLAYBACK), but it did it with class.

Anyways, onto the review.


Who is this app designed for:

This application is designed for the person who doesn't want a separate application to play audio, one for video, and one for dvd playback. This application allows you to use your existing dvd decoders (Intervideo, powerdvd, nvidia, etc) to playback dvd's. It can scan your system to alert you to what formats you wont be able to play and a plugin exists for so you can use it for everything under the sun. This is also the ideal application for someone who wants to use their pc as an integral part of their home theater. So, in summary, if you want one application for all of your media playback needs, this is it.


What does it cost:

Standard Version - Free for non-commercial use
Pro Version         - 27.95 (adds dvd navigation capabilities, locked or incomplete file playback, and a few other features)  http://www.inmatrix.com/zplayer/pro/pro_why.shtml
WMV Pro Version - 35.95 (adds playback support for DRM protected windows media files) http://www.inmatrix.com/zplayer/pro/wmv_why.shtml



The Good

First off, let me start by saying that if you love to configure your applications to any extent possible, this is your application. Zoom player leaves no limit to what you can configure. Here is a screenshot of the main options dialog showcasing the various options you can setup.

The basic options dialog



The expanded advanced options dialog



As you can see, there are plenty of ways to configure zoom player.

The next major area I would like to focus on is the recently added hotkey support. As many of you know, I posted a request in the Coding snacks section for an AHK script to control ZP via hotkeys, however, I also posted a request over at the zoom player forums and to my amazement this was already implemented in an unreleased preview (the current build). With ZP, you can not only now add hotkeys, but you can create a custom key configuration for any of the functions within zoom player.

Here is a text file that showcases the standard configuration for keys defined in zoom player, but as I said, you can change this to however you see fit.

[attach=1]

Next thing I would like to hit on is the DVD Playback configuration. ZP doesn't come with its own built-in dvd decoder, but instead it relies on a 3rd party decoder. It supports various decoders such as Intervideo's, PowerDVD's, Nero, NVidia's, Sonic, etc and each can be easily configured. With ZP, you can configure the exact decoder used for video and audio decoding, as well as dvd navigation (E.G., you can use the Nvidia PureVideo video decoder, while using the intervideo audio decoder and microsoft dvd navigator used with WMP). This allows you to choose the best combination of decoders for use with ZP's dvd playback functionality.

Here is a screenshot of the dvd customization screen (YMMV)



The next thing I want to hit on is the format compatibility. While ZP doesn't include built-in support for these formats (it includes some, but it can playback many more), it does allow the user to utilize whichever codecs they have installed on the system so any format can be played back. ZP also offers a unique system scan feature which alerts you which formats you might not be able to play due to lack of a codec. It also provides you links back to the ZP site which includes download links for various codecs. You can see a list of these codecs here

http://www.inmatrix.com/zplayer/formats/

So basically, if a codec exists, the player can handle it. This includes formats like Real Media, Quicktime, DivX, XviD, shn, flac, etc.


The needs improvement section

Now, I could go on and on about the positives of ZP, however, let me focus on a few of the annoyances and negativities I've noticed.

The first issue I would like to point out is when utilizing the Auto-Size options as provided in the interface options, you can get some weird looking UI displays. The auto-size option is designed to resize the UI to 100% of the target video when loading a new file. However, with the latest 9X.XX drivers from nvidia, you are presented with a UI where the video overlays the controls, requiring you to resize the window. The end result is something like this



As you can see, the playback controls are visible (partially) behind the video overlay, but you have to resize the window to get it to display properly. This, however, has been reported to the devs and they are aware of it. Hopefully a fix will be given soon

Another bug in this preview version is that the dvd customizations aren't saved all the time, requiring you to reconfigure the renderer selections. This, although a minor issue, can be a small annoyance.

Another bug I have noticed in the newly implemented hotkeys, is that when you use a hotkey to control the open file dialog and preferences dialog, the entire application is pushed to the rear behind any other application. This requires you click its taskbar entry to bring it to the front. However, the open file dialog and preferences dialog are then pushed to the rear of the main interface if "Stay On Top" is selected for the main ZP interface. This, again, has been reported to the devs and I hope they fix it prior to 5.0 goes gold!

Here is an example of what I am talking about



Conclusions

As I said above, I consider ZP to be a very well written and coded program. The support is top notch and the developers are very friendly. You can get a response on their forums very rapidly. ZP provides you a way to playback pretty much every media format available. I now use this on my pc to control all playback of media and I find it a very nice replacement to winamp and any other player I have tried. So, in summary, if you require an All-In-One player and do not want to deal with separate players for video, audio, and dvd, then you will be very happy with Zoom Player.

This is Josh (The Shamurai) leaving you with his quote of the day

"Windows98 (win'do-s-98): n. a 32-bit extension and graphical shell for a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor, written by a 2-bit company, that can't stand 1 bit of competition or criticism."

"Windows ME: (n.)4. Proof that God has a sense of humor."

By the way, Zoom player has decided to do a promotion where they will give away one copy of the Pro and one copy of the WMV Pro versions per month for one year with donationcoder.com. They will also be offering a 20% discount throughout the month of august. I will post the link to the registration page prior to the start of the month.

I specially like this one:

Myth - "The Windows Platform has more Security Vulnerabilities than the Linux/Unix Platform"

Reality - "Between January 2005 and December 2005 there were 5198 reported vulnerabilities: 812 Windows operating system vulnerabilities; 2328 Unix/Linux operating vulnerabilities; and 2058 Multiple operating system vulnerabilities" - Source

I love that. People always assume that just because the windows vulnerabilities get more publicity (because it is a much more widely used platform) that there are more for windows. This is not the case. Its just we never hear "The linux kernel had a stack overflow, or DDoS vulnerability today" because the linux platform is not in the majority of use. I subscribe to the secunia, security focus, panda's oxygen, and several other mailing list's and I get to see just how many vulnerabilities come across the pipe. You'd be surprised how many more exploits exist for linux and its included software than do for windows.

Well, microsoft releases tools all the time without support (ala, the power toys (tweakui)). They are usually developed by a single developer or two, and are released to give you access to some other features. That is why the lack of documentation and support is as it is.

Mainly, administrators were upset over this. They were upset that the user might be able to encrypt files that the admin could not view. Personally, if an administrator cannot limit installable applications on the pc, they arent a very good admin. If the user REQUIRES admin privellages, then make sure they understand the software policy and what is/isnt allowed.

I honestly dont see the issue here being that there is already EFS which has existed since Win2K. The only difference here is that this program makes the folder password protected (which can be said the same for EFS if you are using multiple user accounts).

I honestly dont see the big deal But perhaps I am not looking deep enough into it

trust me, the devs enjoy a challenge. You'd be surprised to know how many "hacks" are in am to make it work with certain apps ;-)

App, thanks for the link! Like I said in the irc channel, I couldnt access that page with the d/l links you posted. This is much appreciated.

As for aol breaking an entry Jeff adds, well, that is why he is around. He is constantly fixing what sites add to get around the programs like admuncher. Heck, he fixed http://environmentalchemistry.com/ which actively scans for ad blockers by running a script he wrote. Jeff also encourages you leave ad muncher set to not filter sites that you use frequently and enjoy to give the developers some sort of revenue back for their hard work.