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| | Zoom Player 6.00 final : Reviews |
Rating: 4.0 | | |
 Zoom Player 5.00 final
Date: 24 Jun 2007 | Rating: 5 | Written by: Motorcycleboy |
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Ian's comments are justified to some extent, but I still highly rate Zoomplayer. I have a macine with a 1.2 GHz CPU which ought to be adequate for playing back videos using software decoders, but in practice I find that various media players that I have tried have a problem of excessive CPU load giving jerky playback. This is particularly a problem with DVDs. Free products like the DScaler mpeg-2 decoder and Media Player Classic give particularly poor results when playing DVDs. Commercial mpeg-2 decoders like Nvidia have a much reduced CPU load with the Cineplayer DVD decoder 2.3.1 having the least CPU load. However, each new version of WMP becomes more bloated and feature rich thus demanding more system resources and cancelling out the improved performance provided by the Nvidia and Cineplayer decoders.
ZoomPlayer is a lightweight rendering engine with no built in codecs and filters and which places less demand on system resources than WMP. There is a noticeable improvement in rendering of movement compared to WMP for all formats. A DivX4 movie that was unwatchable under WMP 11 is adequately presented by Zoomplayer. Zoomplayer provides the ability to select from more than one source of codecs installed for each format so that you can experiment for best performance. For instance, I deselected the Nero codec for DivX and instead selected the latest DivX 6.4.3 codec to produced enhanced playback of my DivX4 movie.
There is no limit to the number of video and audio formats that can be played back since the choice depends on how many codecs you have installed. When you first install Zoomplayer your system is scanned for the most important codecs and you informed if any are missing. You are then given the opportunity to automatically download and install the missing codecs of your choice. Not really any more messy than WMP install. You can use products like XPlite and Nlite to get rid of WMP leaving just WMP 6.4 so that you can install the WMV and WMA codec pack.
Zoomplayer also has a stylish and unfussy Gui with skins available.
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Zoom Player 5.00 final
Date: 6 May 2007 | Rating: 3 | Written by: Ian |
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Its is less a multimedia player and more of a GUI for a plethora of software that installs with the EXE. This makes for a comparatively lengthy and dirty uninstall....
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