Introduction:

The Internet age has sparked the explosion of online filesharing, and along with that, the availability of movies has grown. Crystal clear file formats such as divx and svcd are traded avidly. The situation with xvid and vcd is similar. But what kind of software can play these files? You're going to have to hunt down the proper codecs to play these video files. But we'll cover that in another review.

Top names such as PowerDVD and Intervideo WinDVD are quite popular in the scene. However, I can't say I want to pay for a player designed for DVD when I'm interested in using it for divx. Windows media player is so unbearably slow, even on my AMD Athlon XP and P4 systems. So after hunting around for a suitable media player, I came across one that I really like. Zoom Player. It's more versatile than the official player shipped with divx and it's faster than any other player I have seen lately.

Fu nctionality:

Zoom player has many feature rich options. Some include advanced aspect ratio customization, advanced optional dvd mode, full interaction with installed codecs including the ability to set options in real time, on screen display, skinnable interface and so much more.

One of the beautiful things that I found about Zoom Player is it has so many features and yet it doesn't seem to be bloated down. I've been using Zoom Player for almost a year and I've watched it grow up to be a very stable and viable free solution for anybody.

You can customize anything and everything with Zoom player. Remarkably, it doesn't bloat down anything within the performance of this software. The configuration menu is very comprehensive with ability to change the player buttons, customize overlay colours, on screen display, aspect ratio, take advantage of third party audio filters for 3d audio and so much more.

Complete with chapt ers, play lists, tracks, built-in mp3 player, audio system and easily customizable options. Zoom player is a full media player with everything you need to enjoy any type of movie format with the right codecs.

Additionally, Zoom player can handle movies with various audio tracks and recognizes many subtitle formats. This built in feature can make many tasks easier while watching a foreign film.

Zoom player also has the option to set one touch commands with your mouse. I use this feature to set the volume up or down with my intellimouse wheel.

Conclusion:

After researching many free, commercial, shareware and open source players, I found Zoom player to be the more versatile and customizable solution for video in windows. Zoom player really does take advantage of your system's hardware and utilizes it smarter than many of it's competitors. I also found Zoom player to be a worthy rival to it's commercial counterparts. n

With more features and better options than commercial players, PowerDVD and WinDVD, why pay for an all in one solution when you can download it for free from inmatrix? Zoom player has the power to handle every aspect of the media spectrum. In my opinion, Zoom player is a better choice compared to it's commercial counterparts. I won't even compare it to windows media player.

Zoom player gets my thumbs up, and I anticipate new versions will improve this already great peice of software.