The file associations on my system still connect MKV files to Zoom Player. I had an urge to watch the beginning of Saki again, and opened that directory and clicked on it, and Zoom Player fired up, and played it properly.

Wait a minute, I thought; Zoom Player dies on MKV files now, doesn't it? I remembered having trouble with a late DBK ep locking it up, so I tried that one, and yup, Zoom Player went CPU bound. So what was the difference between them?

I dumped the full MediaInfo output on each file and compared them. (By the way, that sucker is worth its weight in gold, especially since it's free.) There were some minor differences in the video encoding (the DBK ep was running a lot higher bit rate) but the big thing that stood out was that the DBK ep used AC3 for its audio, whereas Saki was AAC.

So I just ran through a whole bunch of different files from different series, checking each with MediaInfo to see what sound codec it used and then trying it out.

The result is conclusive: three using AC3 all locked up. 10 using MP3 all played. 5 using AAC all played. 4 using Vorbis all played. Something is fouled up in how Zoom Player is trying to handle AC3.

So now I have a clue to chase. I think it's time to visit the CCCP control panel.

UPDATE: Indeed! I went into Zoom Player's "Playback:Audio" menu and changed the audio renderer from "Cyberlink Audio Renderer (PDVD8)" to "Speakers (ASUS Xonar U1 Audio D)" -- the Xonar being the external USB sound module my headphone is connected to.

And now that DBK episode works, too. I'm going to do some more testing to see if anything else got broken.

UPDATE: Sora Kake Girl (VOrbis) works
Smash Hit (MP3) works
Saki (AAC) works

So Zoom Player is now fixed. Media Player is a good program, but it doesn't have bookmarks that I found, and it doesn't have a one-button "skip 20 second" function that I found. I'll keep it around for special occasions, but it looks like Zoom Player is now completely rehabilitated! Yay!

UPDATE: Media Player still looks to be the preferred tool for taking frame grabs from BDs.

UPDATE: I just had it lock up on an AAC file, so there's still mysteries going on.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 06:34 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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