Announcing Zoom Player MAX & IPTV version 20
Published January 6th, 2025
What's new in this release:
* In an effort to modernize Zoom Player's Home Theater look & feel, I've been
working with Godwin on a new icon style. Simple, clean, subtle shading.
Another small tweak I made is to the Home Theater interfaces title area. It
is now using a more standard font & color, reducing the number of different
fonts used on-screen for a cleaner look.
If you would like to comment on the new design, leave me a post on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/zoomplayer
* New Media Server Browser feature that allows you to stream media from
a local or remote Media Server (Adv. Options / Playback / Media Server).
Zoom Player currently supports the top-3 media servers:
1. Plex
2. Emby
3. Jellyfin
There is no limit to the number or types of servers you can add, you can
mix and match as many servers as you want.
With Zoom Player MAX, you can access the new Media Server Browser using
the Shift+"Y" keyboard shortcut or using the right-click menu under the
"Open Interface" sub-menu.
With Zoom Player IPTV, there is an additional dedicated button to open the
Media Server Browser window and it's the second option from the top on the
right-click menu.
Right-clicking a media entry to show information about the media along
with any associated art (poster/cover image).
Please note that depending on the media server type, load and connectivity,
using libVLC to stream content from a media server may offer faster seeking
and audio/subtitle track switching.
Depending on the Media Server used, the returned search result may differ.
For example, when searching the entire server, Emby will return Movies,
TV Series, Seasons and Episodes, including if the search term is only in
the show name and not an episode's title.
Plex and Jellyfin on the other hand, will only return Movies, TV Series
and Episodes that the search term matches the entry's title. Episodes
and Seasons that do not contain the Series name in the title, will not
be listed.
Plex is even worse when searching within a category, it does not search
recursively so it's not working much better than the filtering feature.
* New "Media Server" Media Library plugin. After specifying your media
server credentials in Zoom Player's options dialog (Adv. Options /
Playback / Media Server), Simply press Shift+"M" to open the media
library category editor, select either the TV Shows or Movies category
mode and click "Create Category".
You will be presented with a choice of categories available on the
specified media servers. Pick a category and you're done, full access
to your Plex, Emby or Jellyfin library accessible directly from
Zoom Player's media library.
* New "Stream connection attempts" IPTV setting (Adv. Options / Playback /
IPTV). IPTV servers can be overloaded at times and may require more than
one attempt to establish a connection. The default value is now "3"
connection attempts before showing an error.
* New libVLC option ("Adv. Options / Playback / libVLC" or "Adv. Options /
Playback / Media Server", this setting appears twice) to control whether
the libVLC media engine should be used when playing content from media
servers.
* You can now edit a media library plug-in's memory cache duration by
opening the category editor (Shift+"M") and pressing the "Configure
Category" button (the default value is specified by the plugin itself).
* New Shift+"Y" keyboard shortcut to open the Media Server browsing client.
* The default IPTV skin now includes new buttons to open the Home
Theater Media Library and Media Server Browser interfaces. These
buttons replace the Fast Forward and Rewind buttons which work on
a technology that is not really practical with streaming content.
* New "Play History" button on the IPTV Player window next to the
"Play Stream" button to quickly replay the last 10 (configurable,
see below) viewed streams.
* New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback / IPTV) that controls how many
streams should be saved in the IPTV Player window's play history drop-
down menu). The default value is "10" and you can set it to "0" to
completely disable saving IPTV stream playback history.
* New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface / Fullscreen Navigation / Settings)
to control whether the media library shows a media's duration next to the
media's name in list view (enabled by default).
* You can now define a Personal Rating and leave a Personal Note in the
media library's meta-data editor. Setting a Personal Rating overrides
the Star rating user interface display, but does not affect sorting or
filtering by Star rating.
* New "Sort by Personal Rating" media library sorting option.
* New "Filter by Personal Rating" media library filtering option.
* You can now set the DVD Video Renderer to MPC-VR. Please note that if
LAV Filters is used with hardware accelerated video decoding in "D3D11"
or "DXVA2 (native)" modes, subtitles will not be visible.
* The Media Library's Plugin API has been enhanced to provide additional
information to the plugin, opening access to new features (e.g. Media
Server plugin).
* New feature to reset Zoom Player to default settings. Accessible from
the advanced options dialog by clicking the "Help / Export" button.
* You can now change the skin magnification from 100% to 400% through
the right-click menu within the "Controls" sub-menu.
* New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface / On Screen Display) to only
show the time when showing the clock (Alt+Ctrl+"D" keyboard shortcut).
By default both the Time and Date are shown.
* Since neither of the Subtitle components used by Zoom Player (DirectVobSub
and xySubFilter) support VTT subtitles, I wrote code to dynamically convert
".VTT" files to ".SRT" files on the fly.
The temporary ".SRT" files are saved to the windows temp folder and are
erased as soon as the media closes. This feature only works on external
subtitle files.
* Two new functions added to the XBOX controller Stick controls
(Adv. Options / Interface / XInput) to control the volume using
and seek forward/backward a number of seconds.
* You can now assign any Zoom Player function to the XBOX controller
trigger buttons. The default custom values are seeking backward/forward.
* New (optional) color Hue adjustment control bar buttons, including
Increase Hue, Decrease Hue and Reset Hue.
* New (optional) control bar button to open the Media Server Browser.
* New TCP/IP API command #3210 that returns information on whether
the user accepted or canceled a file delete request.
* New "exSkinMagnify" extended function that lets you set the skin's
magnification values. Valid values are 1 (100%) to 8 (800%).
* Added smart play profiles for Audiobooks in the ".M4B" and ".AAX" formats.
* Added "AAX" as a default Audio file extension format. This change is not
applied automatically to existing installation, you can apply it by
clicking the "Default" button next to the audio extensions under "Advanced
Options / File Format Association / File Extensions".
* The Media Library plug-in API has been extended to allow plugins to
specify their own memory cache duration. The default value for most
plugins is 1 hour. The default value for the media server plugin is
24 hours. Using the "Refresh" option clears the cache and retrieves
fresh data.
+ Re-opening the IPTV Player window should now be nearly instant.
The only downside is that if you edit the files manually while Zoom Player
is running, you will have to restart Zoom Player for the changes to
take affect.
+ New (optional) control bar button to open the IPTV Player window added
to Zoom Player MAX.
+ The IPTV setup window (Adv. Options / Playback / IPTV) now allows
you to set an auto-update time that includes a fractional value,
allowing the database to be updated more than once per day.
The minimal automatic update value is approximately 30 minutes.
+ A message explaining libVLC was not installed on your computer
accidentally displayed when libVLC was installed but failed to
open a file or stream.
+ The Zoom in functions (both standard and DirectShow) now try to Zoom
in toward the mouse cursor when triggered using the mouse wheel.
+ The Playlist Editor's right-click context menu has been simplified with
some of the items moved to an "Extras" sub-menu.
+ The IPTV Player window is now using skinned right-click context menus.
+ You can now select and play multiple items directly from the play history
window (Alt+"H" keyboard shortcut).
+ Added ellipsis "..." symbols to Home Theater list interfaces where
previously the text was simply cut off.
+ Added ellipsis "..." symbols to the playlist editor.
+ Added ellipsis "..." symbols to the meta-data display area when playing
audio tracks.
+ The Options window's Search feature will now start showing results only
from the second letter searched, typing that first character returned
a lot of results which wasn't as snappy as I wanted and there's nothing
to search for that is one letter long, so it didn't make sense either.
+ The default TCP/IP Control API port has been changed to 32999.
+ The default Web Server Control port has been changed to 32998.
+ Play history is used by many of the features, making the default value
of storing history for 30 days no longer make sense. I have now changed
the default value to 18262 days (approximately 50 years).
+ The mouse wheel should work better when scrolling through options in
the advanced options dialog.
+ The Media Library Playlist plugin can now handle playlists that have
x32 more entries compared to the previous version (over 24,000 entries).
+ The Media Library RSS plugin is now more compatible with Atom feeds.
+ The Media Library RSS plugin should be a little faster parsing feeds.
+ I am disabling the "Display OSD through MadVR's OSD API" setting (Adv.
Options / Playback / Video) on every install. This feature can have a
negative impact on the user experience, its only benefits is if you
use MadVR in fullscreen exclusive mode, a mode that is no longer
of much use when running Windows 10 or better.
If you previously used this feature and would like to continue using
it, it can be re-enabled in the options.
+ libVLC's default audio framework is now set by default to "DirectSound",
otherwise using libVLC and changing the volume would affect the windows-
level volume level for Zoom Player (which should always be set to 100%).
+ Added "cover" to the "Background image search mask" feature which is
used to find album art images when playing audio files. So right now
the search mask covers both "folder" and "cover" file names (in any
support image format).
- The IPTV's "Force http" Xtream Codes setting did not actually force "http"
connections if the server reported it supports "https", but doesn't
actually have a server listening on the https port.
- Fixed a bug that prevented some channel icons from being displayed in the
IPTV player window.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the IPTV player window from being closed after
playing a stream and then closing and re-opening the IPTV player window.
- Fixed a crash when using the keyboard or remote in the confirmation
home theater interface (used when resuming playback or to confirm
erasing a file) to press Enter multiple times in quick succession.
- Fixed a crash when opening the IPTV's or EPG Grid's 'customize' menus
on a monitor with a DPI setting larger than 100%.
- Fixed a crash when opening the play history window on a monitor with
a DPI setting larger than 100%.
- Setting "On Playlist Complete" to "Auto-Rewind" could have triggered
a crash or unstable behavior under some conditions.
- Fixed a crash when loading 4bit PNG images with transparency. This was
especially nasty with the IPTV player window as some stream logos were
using this format, causing the IPTV Player feature to become unstable
(unable to close window or an outright crash).
- Fixed a relatively rare crash when closing the confirmation home theater
interface (used when resuming playback or to confirm erasing a file).
- Fixed a relatively rare crash when closing the virtual keyboard interface
(used when renaming files in the media library or trying to access a
password protected category).
- Fixed an infinite-loop freeze when using the media library with a
network share path (e.g. "\\ServerName\Movies\") folder based category,
entering a sub-folder within that category and later on renaming or
deleting the folder server-side without updating Zoom Player's
media library configuration.
- Fixed a bug in the open-drive feature (which is also used when auto-
mounting ISO files) that failed to properly load virtually mounted
BluRay content.
- Fixed a bug where re-opening the IPTV Player window with a previously
selected stream highlighted didn't enable the "Play Stream" button.
- Using the media library's Filter by Star Rating feature showed a value
range, for example "6 - 7", but did not actually show any 7.0 entries,
showing only up to 6.9.
- Setting the DVD Video Renderer to MadMR did not work at all with only
audio playing. Please note that if LAV Filters is used with hardware
accelerated video decoding in "D3D11" or "DXVA2 (native)" modes,
subtitles will not be visible.
- Titles in the skinned right-click menu were not horizontally aligned.
- The Shift+Arrow keys to accurately reposition the video image or player
windows stopped functioning at some point and now works again.
- The "Reset Brightness" feature when using the EVR or MadVR video renderers
reset the brightness to "1" instead of "0".
- Hiding IPTV Groups containing the quote character in the group's name did
not work as intended.
- The Media Library RSS Feed plug-in should be better at handling text
that is not encoded in UTF8 or English (e.g. Russian).
- libVLC's audio framework selection was completely broken, selecting another
device wouldn't work at all or would use the default audio device instead.
- When streaming media using libVLC, under some unknown condition, libVLC
starts sending 1000's of time-changed events to Zoom Player every second,
causing Zoom Player's user interface to freeze under the load. I wrote
custom code to filter out all the duplicate events to work-around this
issue.
- Fixed a bug in Zoom Player IPTV that partially broke translation of the
options dialog left-pane tree view, causing some lines to remain in
the original English.
- The setting to go fullscreen on play was accidentally disabled in
Zoom Player IPTV.
- Fixed a bug that caused some error message text to get truncated.
- In some resolutions, the meta-data display for playing audio media did
not use a round-rectangle background correctly, causing text to appear
partially outside the background.
- Some over-zealous code optimization broke the audio playback meta-data
display area, showing tags for empty fields.
- When loading TAG data from audio files and MP4 files containing unicode
character using MediaInfo.dll, the media title appeared as a series of
question marks.
- Selecting the libVLC section in the Advanced Options dialog a second time
no longer tries to relist libVLC's audio devices, causing a slight delay.
- Fixed an issue that prevented the libVLC media engine from playing media
files containing Emoji characters.
- Fixed an issue that under some conditions caused the media library
thumbnail text to render incorrectly, either not utilizing the
available space or actually drawing over the thumbnail.
- Fixed loading ".Cue" external chapter files not loading the correct
chapter positions.
- The Media Library's "Playlist" plugin did not display the media's title
when listing ".M3U" playlists.
- Opening the options dialog now resets the IPTV player cache to make
sure changes are updated when re-opening the IPTV player window.
- The XBOX controller functions were not being triggered at the correct
speed and in the case of analog input (stick, triggers), the function
did not repeat if the stick/trigger did not move.