Highlights:
- Support for the new AV1 codec.
- Media Library enhancements.
- Station manager enhancements.
- Important bug fixes.
What's new in Zoom Player v14.4:
* Initial support for the AV1 video compression format:
AOMedia Video 1 (AV1), is an open, royalty-free video coding format
designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It is being
developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium
of firms from the semiconductor industry, video on demand providers,
and web browser developers, founded in 2015.
The AV1 codec should eventually provide a 20% superior image
quality/bitrate compared to HEVC (H.265).
* New "Run Application" media library plugin that lets you run applications
and scripts directly from a media library category thumbnail.
* New Setting (Adv. Options / Interface), Station manager should stay on
top of other application when switching to fullscreen mode.
* New Setting (Adv. Options / Playback), Load .URL files as streaming media
(otherwise load as web page).
* New (Adv. Options / Playback) "On play complete" option to execute an
application or script as soon as the playlist completes playing.
+ Media library meta-data scraping had issues with long file paths and
URLs (over 200 characaters, depending on Zoom Player's installation
path) due to an early design decision to make the cached entries easy
to identify using their file names and URL addresses.
However, to this day, windows does not support paths longer than 255
characters correctly. As a work-around, if a long file name or url is
processed, the cache mechanism now uses a short hash instead
of the full file name or url.
+ Enhanced support for RSS feed thumbnails. More thumbnails should show
up when adding RSS feeds as media library categories (including more
category thumbnail for feeds that support them).
+ If an RSS Feed has multiple entries with the same publish date, the
entries will now be second-level sorted by URL.
+ The number of RSS entries cached by the media library plugin has been
raised from 2000 to 5000.
+ Two Sonique visualization resolution settings have changed from an
aspect ratio of 4:3 to 16:9 :
320x240 -> 320x180
640x480 -> 640x360
This change may not be reflected in the drop-down list if you are
not using an updated language pack, but this is just cosmetic, the
new resolutions are set according to the numbers above.
+ Enhanced the SHOUTcast station sorting.
+ When downloading playlists, Zoom Player now uses the windows temp
folder instead of the 'my documents'.
+ When playing archive files (zip/rar), the archive is now extracted to
the windows temp folder instead of 'my documents'.
+ Meta-data returned when playing streaming audio is now trimmed to remove
superfluous spaces before/after the returned text.
- A race condition caused the scrape manager thread not to signal it is
terminating correctly, causing Zoom Player to freeze on exit.
- The media library playlist plugin now supports playlist URLs longer than
255 characters long.
- RSS feeds containing a special unicode line-break character in the
description would trigger a freeze when opening the RSS media library
category a second time.
- Enabling the "Share Play History at a custom path" setting and not
specifying a trailing "\" in the folder name would cause the play
history to be saved incorrectly.
- The "Continue to the next Playlist item when an invalid file is played"
setting would skip tracks if the unplayable media was the last playlist
entry.
- Opening a playlist from the file-open dialog would not always preserve
the active playlist entry as specified in the playlist file.
- Some unicode characters did not show up correctly in the playlist editor
and music OSD if the selected font did not support the characters.
Now a different windows text-rendering function is used, one that takes
unsupported character from a system-default font.
- When including an executable entry in the playlist, playback did not
progress to the next track correctly and would cause the wrong title
to appear in the playlist editor.
- Playing an audio file with visualization could cause the right click menu
to show multiple "close navigator" entries when right-clicking on a
fullscreen navigation interface.
- The SHOUTcast station browser would show duplicate entries after opening
the dialog multiple times on different days.
- When playing SHOUTcast/ICEcast streams, playing the next track would
cause the previously playing title to overwrite the new track's title
in the playlist editor.
- Opening a streaming URL from clipboard (Alt+Ctrl+"U") failed to work if
the URL was a playlist.
- Pressing the "Play (add to playlist)" button while a navigation interface
was visible and the "Stop closes the navigation interfaces" setting was
enabled prevented playback of the station from starting.
- Parsing ".CUE" files failed when the an entry contained the word "TRACK"
in either the performer or title tags.
