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Software doesn't have to be boring. I have set up this blog to list what I think is some of the best software available at the moment.

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Zoom Player

Getting bored with just my audio music collection, I've been branching out with collecting music videos on my computer. There are many available on the internet from artists websites, and many CD singles now include the video. The trouble is they all come in different file formats, normally Windows Media (.wmv), Quicktime (.mov) or Real Media (.rm). While I do have the official players for all these formats installed, I have to launch each file manually. What I need is a media player which will play all these formats. Well, I think i've found one... Zoom Player.

You may say that the Real One player will play all the above formats, but I don't like the interface and am a bit unnerved by its instance to contact the web everytime you play something to see if additional content is available (and who knows what else). Zoom Player, on the other hand, is small and doesn't take a lot of resources while also playing almost every file type and having a modern (and skinnable) interface. While it does come in a shareware professional version, the basic player is free for non-commercial use. As far as I can tell, all that is missing is DVD support, but they rightly urge you to upgrade if you use the player a lot (which I very well might do).

Zoom player does not actually have its own decoders for each of the file formats, but instead cleverly uses all the official decoders. This does mean you need the official players installed, but that shouldn't be an issue for most people. Zoom player supports all the Windows Media formats using the DirectShow interface which comes as part of DirectX (this is all that Windows Media Player does as well). Real Media files are supported by using a special DirectShow bridge which fools the Real Media decoder to output through a Real Media bridge (which incidentally also allows Windows Media Player to play Real Media files). You need to install this Real Media bridge (called a splitter) yourself, just follow the instructions on the free-codecs site (and looking at the How to install/uninstall DLL and AX codec/filter files link at the bottom of the page). QuickTime files are supported by cleverly loading the Quicktime browser plugin in the Zoom Player window. I had to upgrade to the latest version of Quicktime to make this work, but now its flawless and seamless.

The only thing I find a little disapointing is the lack of a media library like the excellent one in Windows Media Player. There is a media library of sorts, but it's a bit crytic and I'm still trying to figure it out (I think you need the pro version to use it properly as well). Still, all my music videos are stored in one folder and the player has a very useful Open Directory feature which will load all the content in the selected folder (and its sub-folders) in the playlist window. It also remembers the folder the next time you start the player. As long as all the files have both the artist name and track name in the title, this works surprisingly well.

I've been looking for a combined media player for a while, and this is the first one I've found which really meets the grade. With a better media library I might switch to this for everything, but in the mean time I'm sticking to Windows Media Player for all my audio and will be using Zoom Player for all my video. Having these seperate actually works out quite well so I'm now very happy!

I've added Zoom Player to the sidebar!

posted by Stephen @ 10:43 PM

1 Comments:

At 4:43 PM, swissred said…

Really interesting adware post. I'm the webmaster of an adware serial website, feel free to grab info from there for your next posts.

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